Monday, February 16, 2015

Oh-My ... particle

in other words, a subatomic particle with kinetic energy equal to that of 50 Joules, or a 5-ounce (142 g) baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph)

... 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.


Such a particle would all by itself pack quite a wallop.  I have read that if you could stick your hand in the proton particle stream of the Large Hadron Collider, you would no longer have a hand.

The universe as we know it is full of violent events, but it is hard to see how a natural event could create this without us detecting the event itself.   This makes me wonder if the particle could have been shot out by some alien spaceship electromagnetic propulsion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_propulsion#Electromagnetic_propulsion.  All the energy used to propel the particle would propel the spacecraft in the opposite direction, i.e Newton's third law of motion.  The only problem with this idea is that our current methods of accelerating particles to very high speeds require many miles of equipment costing billions of dollars.


No comments:

Post a Comment