A standard baseball has a mass of 0.145 kg. How fast would it be moving if it had 51 J of kinetic energy?

½ (0.145 kg) v² = 51 J
v = 26.5 m/s ~ 60 mph

If a typical adult threw a baseball as hard as they possibly could, it'd have about as much kinetic energy as the OMG particle.

Reconstructing information about ultra-high energy cosmic rays like the OMG Particle is very tricky.

Fly's Eye did it by studying emissions from the cascade of collisions after an energetic particle slammed into the upper atmosphere.

Their analysis gave an energy (3.2 ± 0.9) x 10²⁰ eV for the OMG Particle. So somewhere between 37 J at the low end and 66 J at the high end, with a central value of 51 J.

The "OMG Particle" should not to be confused with the “God Particle.”

The latter is a terrible name that you should not use for any reason, while the former is a great name and all physicists are obligated to high-five whoever came up with it.

Also, the "OMG Particle" should not be confused with the "0mg particle," which is another name for a photon.

The most energetic single particle ever detected, a cosmic ray dubbed the "Oh-My-God" particle, was observed by the Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray Detector #OTD in 1991.

Its energy was about 3.2 x 10²⁰ eV ~ 51 J, equivalent to a baseball moving at almost 60 mph.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-particle-that-broke-a-cosmic-speed-limit-20150514/

Image: Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine, using images of the Earth from NASA.

@triptych Huluween is already taken

It is time for Congress to get its act together, and pass a law requiring all TV shows to do one (1) Halloween episode per season.

Wait until she hears where most of the Hydrogen in their bodies came from.

(It was produced in the Big Bang.)

@KevinMarks nice

Passing my phone through the spray of colors formed by light from the late afternoon sun, refracted by the corner of a glass fish tank.

Charles Messier discovered the Whirlpool galaxy #OTD in 1773. The designation M51 refers to its entry in the catalog he produced.

Pretty good galaxy.

Credit: NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith (STScI)/HHT (STScI/AURA)

@zbender https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262048224/monsters-aliens-and-holes-in-the-ground/

Hot dang. Looking forward to sitting down with this.

I’ve always loved that it was “BONK.”

RIP Keith Giffen. One of the greats.

@berlintuesdaystudio Founder Greg Stafford lived near the Oakland Coliseum, and wanted to work chaos in somehow. Chaos + coliseum = Chaosium

Give me a coffee table book that’s just ads from early issues of Dragon and other old school rpg magazines.

Just stunned by how beautiful and well-crafted Reservation Dogs has been. A few episodes left.

Astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung was born #OTD in 1873.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram plots the luminosity of stars vs their surface temperature. The vertical axis is luminosity, low to high moving upwards. The horizontal axis is temperature, from higher to lower reading left to right.

Emoji H-R diagram!

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You may be from East Tennessee, if your papaw’s old file box has a folder in it labeled “possums.”

Look at the notch cut out of that little guy’s ear! What a battle wound. Maybe he’s just a tough guy who doesn’t feel threatened.

Feel like the squirrels at my parents’ house have become a little desensitized to the presence of people.