Extreme Energy Cosmic Rays

Extreme Energy Cosmic Rays are cosmic rays that have more than 50 Exa Electron Voltes (50 EeV). These are thought to be impossible, and no good explanation as to how they are created has been offered.

Discussion

Cosmic Rays with more than 50 EeV of energy are thought to slowly lose energy as they travel vast distanced between galaxies. If they travel about 160 million light years or more, quantum mechanical interactions with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation should bleed energy away from them. This is called the Greisen-Aztsepin-Kuzmin limit. (See this wikipedia article for more information. )

However, we HAVE detected particles with more than this energy. Several ideas have been suggested how they can reach us, some of which break the laws of physics as we understand them. (So we need new physics!) One suggestion that these particles are not protons or alpha particles but rather an iron nucleus, tho how something so heavy is accelerated so fast is hard to explain.

The [| "The Oh My God particle"] is a wiki page that describes the most powerful cosmic ray that we have ever detected.

See Also

Solar Cosmic Rays

Galactic Cosmic Rays

Extra Galactic Cosmic Rays