Where is our resident astrophysicist when you need him?
I am more interested in what they discover about the supposed "God" particle (Higgs Boson).
Here I am. As the video link posted by Gene (
http://gmy.news.yahoo.com/v/8573163) clearly explains, cosmic rays with much higher energies have hit the Earth and all the objects in the solar system an enormous number of times since the Solar System formed about 4.5 billion years ago. The Earth and its biosphere have survived these events without any difficulty. The majority of these ultra-high energy cosmic rays were (and are) produced in supernova explosions.
The Higgs Boson that Halon451 mentions is thought to be the particle that gives matter mass. In particle physics, there are 2 main types of fundamental particles: those with mass called "elementary" particles; and those that are massless called "field" particles -- the 4 known natural forces in the Universe are transmitted via these field particles according to particle physics (i.e., gluons for the strong [nuclear] force, photons for the electromagnetic force, intermediate vector bosons [also called "weakons"] for the weak [nuclear] force, and the yet to be discovered gravitons for gravity). In addition to these classifications, subatomic particles have an intrinsic spin associated with them, and these spins come in two types: 1/2 integer spins (i.e., 1/2, 3/2, etc.) particles are called "fermions" and particles with integer spins (i.e., 0, 1, 2, etc.) are called bosons. Electrons (and other "leptons" [= low mass elementary particles]) and all the quarks (6 of them) that make up hadrons (those particles that obey the strong [nuclear] force) are fermions. Baryons [= heavy elementary particles] are particles composed of 3 quarks (i.e., protons and neutrons), hence have spins of either 1/2 or 3/2s and are fermions. The mesons [= middle mass particles] are composed of quark pairs and have spins of either 0 or 1 and hence are bosons. The field particles mentioned above all have integer spins and hence are bosons.
The spin is important in describing the "final" wave function of the particle which is important in figuring out the physics of particle interactions. However, I won't go any deeper than this and sorry for all the text, but I feel that particle physics is a really "cool" field in physics and the Standard Model summarized above explains a lot about the nature of the Universe.
