Oh-my-god particle

One of the most entertaining names that I’ve come across in the physics sector is the “Oh My God Particle.” Scientists also refer to this  particle as the “ermahgerd particle” (kidding, kidding. It’s not really called that, but it is called the “Oh My God Particle”).  Now, the first thing that may pop into some of your minds is the Higgs Boson, which was discovered in 2012. This isn’t too surprising as the media went around calling it the “God Particle.” However, these two particles are very different.

 

So what is the Oh My God Particle? Well it is a simple, lowly proton. So why the name?

This proton had the effective mass-energy of a baseball traveling at 90 km/h (56 mph)! This type of particle is known as a cosmic ray, they’re generally just protons but can sometimes be a Helium atom or even an electron. What makes them so interesting is that they’re traveling very near the speed of light, and the Oh My God Particle is the fastest ever found.

 

Discovered back in 1991 in Utah, this very high energy particle is likely to have originated from around the Supermassive Black Hole in the galaxy Centaurus A before it made its journey to the Earth. Now we mentioned that it was traveling near the speed of light… Well how near? Well this proton had a energy level of about 50 joules of energy, which is enough to briefly light up a 50 Watt light bulb. This may not seem like much energy, but since a single proton weighs 1.67e-27 kg (or 0.167 with 26 zeroes before it), it must have had an incredible speed. And that speed has been calculated to being about 99.9999999999999999999995% of the speed of light! That means that, per a second, it was traveling only 1.5 quadrillionths of a meter slower than the speed of light.

 

Not to worry though, even though this particle had the mass-energy of a baseball, if you were to be hit by one of these in the head while walking down the street, you wouldn’t be knocked unconscious.

I hope now you can appreciate why it is called the Oh My God Particle…the scientists that detected this particle probably yelled that out when they worked out how fast that single proton was traveling.

Credits: futurism

NEW BIOFUEL FROM GRASS..

It takes millions of years for natural processes to convert plants into gasoline, but researchers at Ghent University have figured out how to do it much faster. By pre-treating grass to make it break down quicker, and then adding Clostridium bacteria similar to that found in your gut, they produced decane, one of the main ingredients of gasoline and jet fuel. While decane is a polluting fuel, commercial jets will need it for at least the next few decades, and the researchers believe their process is efficient enough to make it commercially feasible.

For their system to work, the scientists first treated the grass with a compound that broke it down and made it easier for bacteria to digest. They then treated it with an enriched Clostridium bacteria from the family that makes up the good bacteria in your gut, rather than the one that kills you. Fermentation much like that used for beer produced lactic acid and its derivatives, and further treatment yielded caproic acids. With further processing, that was converted into decane, a primary ingredient of gasoline and jet fuel.

As mentioned, decane and similar products aren't very clean fuels (they produce CO2 when burned), but they still have a much higher energy density than, say, lithium batteries. As such, be the main fuel used in aviation for the foreseeable future, as jet planes need to be relatively light to get aloft.

For now, the process can only yield a few drops of biofuel, but the researchers claim the process is already relatively efficient, and with some more work, could possibly be made commercially feasible. Unlike corn, grass grows pretty much anywhere, so the ability to convert it into fuel on the cheap would be a huge step.