The mysterious origin of the OMG particle

Ground-based telescopes are at least as important as the space telescopes spread throughout the Solar System; after all, they also have ‘eyes’ that look at places that cannot be easily observed. Scientists can analyze events that cannot be seen with the naked eye, such as cosmic rays and infrared frequency waves, from instruments on Earth.

in case of The mysterious Oh My God (OMG) particle is exactly that. Using an array of instruments at the Fly’s Eye experimental observatory in the US, a group of scientists detected a kilometer-long explosion of particles invisible to the human eye. Upper atmosphere from Earth.

It is important to emphasize that the researchers did not directly detect the OMG particle. It is actually a type of ultra-high energy subatomic particle detected through secondary particles produced during interaction with the Earth’s atmosphere. The name Oh My God was chosen because of the particle’s seemingly impossible properties.

“The discovery was initially called the ‘WTF particle,’ but after it became publicly available, a new name was coined by a retired engineer named John Walker. That same year, a book about the then-hypothetical Higgs boson, called The God Particle, was published. ‘The energy of a brick falling on your toe looked much more impressive [do que o Higgs]’ says Walker. ‘So I called it the Oh My God particle,’ explains a study published in the scientific journal New Scientist.

So what is the mystery behind this phenomenon? Why is it considered impossible? To answer these questions and better understand what the OMG particle is, we gathered information from scientific papers and experts in the field.

What is the Oh My God particle?

The detection of the Oh My God particle was made on the night of October 15, 1991.When a team from the University of Utah in the US used the Fly’s Eye experimental observatory to observe cosmic rays in the night sky. At the time, the equipment was collecting data from an ‘atmospheric shower’, an event described as an extensive explosion in space that emits particles invisible to the human eye.

As science explains, cosmic rays are part of a natural phenomenon that occurs in the cosmos, where the Earth is constantly bombarded with subatomic particles. Fortunately, this does not pose any problem for human health. The Earth has a magnetosphere and a thin layer of air that prevent radiation from these rays from reaching the Earth’s surface.

Cosmic rays consist of different subatomic particles, including protons, neutrons, electrons, among others. But some of this cluster contains secondary particles, such as the Oh My God phenomenon. OMG is an ultra-high energy subatomic particle produced by the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth’s atmosphere.

One of the biggest mysteries about the OMG particle is its origin; To this day, scientists are trying to understand where the cosmic rays detected in 1991 came from; There are some theories.

At that time, researchers believed that there was a certain limitation on the maximum possible energy of the cosmic ray, but Oh my God particles showed something that was impossible at the time: Their energy exceeded this limit by 500%.

The mystery is not just limited to the OMG particle, as science has yet to fully discover the origin of ultra-high energy emitting cosmic rays. Scientists think that the energy released by the particle exceeds the energy output of the Large Hadron Collider by 10 million times.

Atomic physics is often measured in more specific terms such as angstrom and electron volt because we are dealing with extremely small scales. For this reason, kilometer, gram or joule measurements are generally not used in measurements. Although the OMG particle is an ultra-high-energy subatomic particle, it does not fit these characteristics because it released an extraordinary amount of energy at the time of detection in 1991. It was about 48 joules.

Oh My God Particle and God Particle

The God particle is a subatomic particle predicted in the Standard Model of particle physics and was detected during an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 2012. The only similarity between the Oh My God particle and the God particle is that they are both subatomic particles, but that’s where the similarity ends.

The God particle, also called the Higgs boson, is associated with the Standard Model of physics, while the Oh My God particle is associated with ultra-high energy cosmic rays. The context and physical properties of both particles are completely different, except that they are both subatomic.

Did you like the content? So, stay updated with more curiosity about particle physics at TecMundo. If you want, take the opportunity to understand how a more precise measurement could reveal the mass of ‘ghost particles’.