Source: https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150514-...

 the night of October 15, 1991, the “Oh-My-God” particle streaked across the Utah sky.

A cosmic ray from space, it possessed 320 exa-electron volts (EeV) of energy, millions of times more than particles attain at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built by humans. The particle was going so fast that in a yearlong race with light, it would have lost by mere thousandths of a hair. Its energy equaled that of a bowling ball dropped on a toe. But bowling balls contain as many atoms as there are stars. “Nobody ever thought you could concentrate so much energy into a single particle before,” said David Kieda, an astrophysicist at the University of Utah.