In these extreme environments, millions of times the mass of Earth exists in a volume of space no larger than a few kilometers in diameter. Now, let’s imagine that we’ve got a natural particle accelerator like a neutron star or a black hole, creating electric and magnetic fields that are unheard of on Earth. ( Credit: Earth: NASA/BlueEarth Milky Way: ESO/S.
Once the energy from cosmic particle/photon collisions exceed a certain threshold, the cosmic particles will begin to lose energy as a function of the energy in the center-of-momentum frame. When cosmic particles travel through intergalactic space, they cannot avoid the leftover photons from the Big Bang: the cosmic microwave background. Here’s what truly limits our motion through space. Rather than the speed of light, the actual speed limit of particles is below that: set by what we call the GZK cutoff. While the Universe is capable of imparting far more energy to particles through natural accelerators - like neutron stars and black holes - than we can ever give them on Earth, even at state-of-the-art machines like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the fact that “the vacuum of space” isn’t a perfect vacuum is far more limiting than we often care to admit. Since the total amount of energy in the Universe is finite, but the energy required for a massive particle to reach the speed of light is infinite, it can never get there.īut in our real-life Universe - not the idealized “toy” version we play with in our heads - we don’t simply have arbitrary amounts of energy to give to particles, and we also have to accept that they’re traveling through the space that actually exists, rather than what we imagine as a complete, perfect vacuum. No matter how much energy you manage to add into the particle in question, you can only get it to approach the speed of light - it will never reach it. As you add progressively more kinetic energy and momentum to your particle, it will travel through space more quickly, approaching the ultimate cosmic speed limit: the speed of light. If you want to travel as fast as you can through the Universe, your best bet is to pump as much energy as possible into as small a mass as you can find.
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