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I love how we're able to debate the origins and life story of a single photon from 2.4 billion light-years away

It says, near the top of the story, "There were so many photons per second that they couldn’t keep up".

Not a single photon. Not easy (not possible?) to distinguish signal from noise with a single photon, afaik.

They detected many photons, but I read this as meaning that they had focused their attention on one specific photon that was detected by their instruments:

> Among those detections was a suspected high-energy photon at 18 teraelectron volts (TeV)—four times higher than anything seen from a gamma-ray burst before and more energetic than the highest energies achievable by the Large Hadron Collider.

It’s the ultimate counterargument to ”my actions don’t matter”.

It’s a very energetic photon though

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