Nobody doesn’t like intergalactic space, but it can be hazardous to your health if you choose to go there. Let’s ignore the fact that you would freeze to death as your warm body tried to reach equilibrium with the 3-degree temperature of the universe. And let’s ignore the fact that your blood cells would burst while you suffocated from the lack of atmospheric pressure. These are ordinary dangers. From the department of exotic happenings, intergalactic space is regularly pierced by super-duper high-energy, fast-moving, charged, subatomic particles. We call them cosmic rays. The highest-energy particles among them have a hundred million times the energy that can be generated in the world’s largest particle accelerators. Their origin continues to be a mystery, but most of these charged particles are protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and are moving at 99.9999999999999999999 percent of the speed of light. Remarkably, these single subatomic particles carry enough energy to knock a golf ball from anywhere on a putting green into the cup.

Nobody doesn’t like intergalactic space, but it can be hazardous to your health
if you choose to go there. Let’s ignore the fact that you would freeze to death as
your warm body tried to reach equilibrium with the 3-degree temperature of the
universe. And let’s ignore the fact that your blood cells would burst while you
suffocated from the lack of atmospheric pressure. These are ordinary dangers.
From the department of exotic happenings, intergalactic space is regularly pierced
by super-duper high-energy, fast-moving, charged, subatomic particles. We call
them cosmic rays. The highest-energy particles among them have a hundred
million times the energy that can be generated in the world’s largest particle
accelerators. Their origin continues to be a mystery, but most of these charged
particles are protons, the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and are moving at
99.9999999999999999999 percent of the speed of light. Remarkably, these single
subatomic particles carry enough energy to knock a golf ball from anywhere on a
putting green into the cup.