In 1991, an experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power ...

Einstein’s theory of gravity may behave slightly differently across distances of billions of light-years, with gravity ...

Illustration of an array of ground-based detectors to characterize a cosmic ray shower. When high-energy cosmic particles strike the atmosphere, they produce a cascade of particles. By building a ...

The Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) collaboration reported the precise measurement of the energy spectrum of cosmic ray helium nuclei from 70 GeV to 80 TeV energies on May 18, 2021. For the ...

This may seem like the cry of a panicking news reporter in a lurid sci-fi tale, but it’s actually a scientific fact — albeit a slightly hyperbolic one. Mysterious cosmic rays traveling at speeds ...

It might be true that there's an ultimate speed limit to everything in the Universe — the speed of light in a vacuum — but that doesn't mean there's a limit to how energetic a single particle can be.

In the 1930s, the French physicist Pierre Auger placed Geiger counters along a ridge in the Alps and observed that they would sometimes spontaneously click at the same time, even when they were up to ...

Roughly a century ago, scientists began to realize that some of the radiation we detect in Earth’s atmosphere is not local in origin. This eventually gave rise to the discovery of cosmic rays — ...

The highest-energy cosmic rays come from subatomic interactions within star clusters, not supernovae, say Michigan Tech physicists and collaborators. For decades, researchers assumed the cosmic rays ...