Apparently there are occasional detections of cosmic rays with absurdly high energies. Like, one particle containing the kinetic energy of a baseball traveling at 60 mph.
I understand that the actual chances of this radiation(?) interacting with any of the structures in my body is extremely low… but what if it did?
What would happen to me if, say, the Oh My God Particle hit, I dunno, a nucleus in a cell of one of my ribs, or something? Would I instantaneously detonate like a corny B movie? Would I get a baseball-traveling-at-60mph-sized bruise? A broken rib? Spontaneous combustion?!
Need answer never, to p=.05, but sooner would be cool too.
Not much would happen. The collision would produce a spray of particles, most of them hadronic. Each produced particle would either pass through you like any other ionizing radiation or re-interact to produce additional sprays of particles. In the end, very little of the energy of the initial high-energy cosmic ray (likely: proton) would end up deposited inside of you. Most would end up deposited in the material “downstream” of you as these secondary particles exit your body. It would take many tens of meters of flesh to capture all of the energy of the shower.
More technically: the interaction would produce a so-called “shower” (or “cascade”) of particles. This shower would leave behind its energy in an increasing rate as it propagates and multiplies, up to a point. After this maximum, the shower would start to fade away, eventually running out of steam when the last new particle can no longer make its own daughters in collisions.
Using some rough calculations, I estimate that the shower will only have “traveled” 3% of the way toward its shower maximum before it exits you. Note that this first 3% of the distance has an even tinier fraction of the energy. Depending on the approach I take (either integrating by eye the shower profile of a 10[sup]20[/sup] eV primary or estimating the shower multiplicity (number of daughter particles produced) in the first 30 cm or so of shower development), I estimate that the radiation exposure you get from this event is equivalent to something between one minute and one day, give or take, on an airplane at 40,000 feet. The latter is probably closer to correct, given how I estimated these.
So, in short: you won’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
What would happen if you got hit by an Oh My God Particle?
Best orgasm evar!
At least if you are a particle physics nerd…and there’s a reason so many women particle physicists are looking for the God Particle (because men can find it apparently).