🔗 The “Oh-My-God Particle”

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

The Oh-My-God particle was the highest-energy cosmic ray detected at the time (15 October 1991) by the Fly's Eye detector in Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, US. Its energy was estimated as (3.2±0.9)×10²⁰ eV, or 51 J. This is 20 million times more energetic than the highest energy measured in electromagnetic radiation emitted by an extragalactic object and 10²⁰ (100 quintillion) times the photon energy of visible light, equivalent to a 142-gram (5 oz) baseball travelling at about 26 m/s (94 km/h; 58 mph). Although higher energy cosmic rays have been detected since then, this particle's energy was unexpected, and called into question theories of that era about the origin and propagation of cosmic rays.

Assuming it was a proton, this particle traveled at 99.99999999999999999999951% of the speed of light, its Lorentz factor was 3.2×10¹¹ and its rapidity was 27.1. At this speed, if a photon were travelling with the particle, it would take over 215,000 years for the photon to gain a 1 cm lead as seen in Earth's reference frame.

The energy of this particle is some 40 million times that of the highest energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator. However, only a small fraction of this energy would be available for an interaction with a proton or neutron on Earth, with most of the energy remaining in the form of kinetic energy of the products of the interaction. The effective energy available for such a collision is √2Emc², where E is the particle's energy and mc² is the mass energy of the proton. For the Oh-My-God particle, this gives 7.5×10¹⁴ eV, roughly 60 times the collision energy of the Large Hadron Collider.

While the particle's energy was higher than anything achieved in terrestrial accelerators, it was still about 40 million times lower than the Planck energy. Particles of such energy would be required in order to explore the Planck scale. A proton with that much energy would travel 1.665×10¹⁵ times closer to the speed of light than the Oh-My-God particle. As viewed from Earth it would take about 3.579×10²⁰ years, or 2.59×10¹⁰ times the current age of the universe, for a photon to gain a 1 cm lead over a Planck energy proton as observed in Earth's reference frame.

Since the first observation, at least 72 similar (energy > 5.7×10¹⁹ eV) events have been recorded, confirming the phenomenon. These ultra-high-energy cosmic ray particles are very rare; the energy of most cosmic ray particles is between 10 MeV and 10 GeV. More recent studies using the Telescope Array have suggested a source for the particles within a 20-degree radius "warm spot" in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major.