Astrophysicists discovered the particle in May of this year and now it described in the scientific journal Science. She claims that her revelation is, without exaggeration, groundbreaking.
This cosmic ray particle surpasses the energy that can be developed in terrestrial accelerators more than a million times. The unprecedented energy it exhibited is approximately 40 million times higher than that of protons produced by the LHC accelerator at CERN in Switzerland.
The Telescope Array experiment, located in Utah, USA, played a key role in capturing this rare event. It consists of a system of surface detectors with 507 stations and three fluorescence detectors, which measure large-scale so-called atmospheric showers created by the interaction of cosmic rays with the gas nuclei of the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Such high-energy particles appear on a square kilometer only once every thousand years, so we are very lucky to have been able to detect them,” explains Federico Urban from the Institute of Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, who has been involved in this international experiment for more than ten years. Comparisons with previous high-energy cosmic ray events from 1991, 1993 and 2001 highlight the significance of the Amaterasu discovery, as it ranks second in energy to the Oh-My-God particle captured in 1991.
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Amaterasu came from a region not far from the plane of the Milky Way, which means that there is a strong influence of our Galaxy’s magnetic field, and this poses a problem for pinpointing the source.
“If you look at the sky in the direction Amaterasu came from, there is nothing there. The explanation that the trajectory of a particle, even if it is possibly a very heavy nucleus, could change so much due to the influence of a strong galactic magnetic field does not quite fit. We use various methods to prove that she really came from nothing. For example, it is impossible for it to come from M87, one of the largest possible sources of particles. So it’s all a bit of a mystery,” explains Urban.
Analysis of the event has raised many questions, such as where the particle came from or whether it was acted upon by forces unknown or poorly understood by science. Experts suggest several possible explanations. Among the more prosaic are much stronger magnetic fields in space, among the more strange the existence of completely unknown particle physics at high energies.
“The point is that the magnetic field model that tells us where to look may be wrong, or there may be magnetic fields outside our Galaxy that are stronger than we think. And if they are there, it’s very interesting because we understand more or less how magnetic fields in galaxies form. But if there’s almost nothing there, it’s very difficult to create magnetic fields outside of galaxy clusters, there’s no reason for that,” adds Urban, who has developed methods to test the idea that there could be magnetic fields in empty regions of space.
The detection of the Amaterasu particle opens up new possibilities for research into the most energetic phenomena in the universe and offers insight into the mechanisms behind the acceleration of ultra-high-energy cosmic particles, or UHECRs. Scientists will continue to grapple with the mysteries surrounding these particles. However, this new event represents a milestone in the effort to understand them.
2023-12-01 11:15:22
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