The event triggered 23 of the surface detectors, with a calculated energy of about 244 exa-electron volts. The “Oh My God particle” detected more than 30 years ago was 320 exa-electron volts.
For reference, 1 exa-electron volt equals 1 billion gigaelectron-volts, and 1 gigaelectron volt is 1 billion electron volts. That would make the Amaterasu particle 244,000,000,000,000,000,000 electron volts. By comparison, the typical energy of an electron in the polar aurora is 40,000 electron volts,
according to NASA.
An ultra-high-energy cosmic ray carries tens of millions of times more energy than any human-made particle accelerator such as the
Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, explained Glennys Farrar, a professor of physics at New York University.