The OMG Particle
On October 15, 1991, astronomers detected a particle going faster than anyone thought was possible. "Nobody ever thought you could concentrate so much energy into a single particle before," said David Kieda, an astrophysicist at the University of Utah. Enter the Oh-My-God particle—not to be confused with the God particle—the mysterious little cosmic ray that could. Probably. No Cosmic Speed limits Here : When this little particle racing at nearly the speed of light was detected in 1991, it took about a year for scientists to believe what they had observed. It was spotted in the sky above Utah by the crude Fly's Eye telescope array, and the signal appeared to break a cosmic speed limit. Quanta magazine puts that in perspective: "[The Oh-My-God particle] possessed 320 exa-electron volts (EeV) of energy, millions of times more than particles attain at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built by humans. The particle was going so fas