The New York Times has an article today on the new discovery regarding ultra-high energy cosmic rays. It is great that they have interest in science at all, even though they probably published the story just for the wow-factor; but the treatment given to the importance of the science is just pathetic.

What are ultra-high-energy cosmic rays?
Cosmic rays are subatomic particles accepted to have extraterrestial origins. The ultra-high-energy variety are those with extremely high kinetic energy. One of the most famous one, observed on the evening of Oct 15, 1991, was christened the Oh-My-God particle because of its extreme speed. The energy measured was 3e20 electronvolts, or about 50 joules. This is startling: imagine how much it would hurt to have a baseball hit you after being thrown at 60 miles per hour. Now imagine a fruit fly the travels fast enough so that it hurts just as much when it flew into your face. Now imagine something sexillion-times lighter hitting you in the face yet hurting just as much.... The estimate of the OMG particle was that it was a proton traveling so fast that a drag-race between it and a particle of light over the distance between the sun and the earth will result in a photo-finish with the photon winning by less than the width of an atomic nuclei.

Why was it so startling?
Back in 1966, three physicists, Kenneth Greisen, Vadim Kuzmin and Georgiy Zatsepin, calculated the theoretical interaction between a subatomic particle and the photons of the cosmic microwave background radiation--the remnant of light from the Big Bang that is still reverberating in our universe. When the particle has high enough energy--6e19 ev, or 5 times less than that of the OMG particle--the interaction should be strong enough to force the cosmic ray to lose energy by emitting pions. Furthermore, the prediction is that particles higher than that energy should never be observed: within 50 mega-parsecs (a quarter of the way across our local supercluster [stars gather to form galaxies; galaxies gather and form local clusters; local clusters gather to form superclusters... that's how big a supercluster is: it takes light about 1 billion years to go from one end of our local supercluster to the other]) there weren't any (by 1966 knowledge) objects that produce such high energy radiation; outside of 50 mega-parsecs, any particles starting with such high energy should have lost enough energy on its way to earth through the interaction with cosmic background that it should no longer have the energy observed.

So when one was observed, it could only mean two things: either the theory (special relativity and particle physics as known in 1966) was wrong, or that the experiment (the observation that such a particle was found, or the assertion that now objects within the local supercluster can produce such energetic particles) was wrong. A lot of physicists were betting on the former. This GZK paradox resulted in the birth of doubly-special relativity (which states that not only is there a fundament speed limit in our universe, there is also a fundamental smallest distance: that if you magnify the fabric of space-time enough, you'd find that space-time is not continuous, but more like a lattice) and loop quantum gravity.

So what's this Pierre Auger Collaboration?
Pierre Auger was a French physicist specializing in atomic, nuclear, and cosmic ray physics. He is probably most known in the physic community for his namesake process, when one inner shell electron is ejected from an atom (by x-rays typically), causing a cascade of an outer shell electron into the hole left behind, there by releasing energy as a photon, which hits a third electron in the outer shell and ejects it. His namesake observatory (which this article is about) is a cosmic ray observatory the size of Rhodes Island built in Argentina. Wikipedia has a pretty good description of its operation parameters. The observatory was started in 2003 expressedly to measure the statistical distribution of the different directions whence came the particles. The idea is trying to see if the particles are isotropic (i.e., the same number comes from all directions), and if not, is there anything at those special directions where most of the particles are found.

So what's the fuss about?
As stated in the abstract of the Science article (the only reason NYT wrote about it), using the data collected in the past 3.7 years, the scientists showed that the source of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is anisotropic. Furthermore, the directions correlate with the expected positions for active galatic nuclei in the local supercluster. One of the theories of galatic nuclei is that at the centers of galaxies sit super-massive black holes, and these objects (which scientists didn't know about 40 years ago) are fully capable of producing particles in the observed energy range.

So to summarize: yet another point for Good Ol Al Einstein, and more evidence for the Black-Hole-in-Galatic-Center theory!