High energy rare particles
space illustration (nasa.gov)
Astronomers have detected rare and very high-energy particles falling to Earth, causing confusion because they come from a seemingly empty region of space, citing the website The Guardian.
The particle is called ‘Amaterasu’, after the Sun Goddess in Japanese mythology, and is one of the highest energy cosmic rays ever detected.
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Its origin is unknown
Quoting from the Scientific American website, ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) are very small particles whose origin is unknown, but which sometimes hit our planet at speeds approaching the speed of light.
UHECR typically arrives on its own without warning, like a speeding bullet from space, crashing into Earth’s atmosphere and exploding in a cascade of secondary particles that trigger a brief, invisible flash of light as the particles rain down on Earth’s surface.
Amaterasu itself hit our planet on May 27 2021, sending a shower of muons, gluons and other secondary particles detected by 23 Telescope Array detectors out of a number exceeding 500.
Such energetic particles can only be produced by the most powerful cosmic events whose scale exceeds that of stellar explosions. Amaterasu appears to emerge from the Local Void, an empty space bordering the Milky Way galaxy.
“When we traced the path back to the source, there was no energy high enough to produce such a powerful particle,” said Prof John Matthews, from the University of Utah, also one of the authors of a paper in the journal Science explaining the discovery.
Amaterasu particles have energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced at the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built and equivalent to the energy of a golf ball traveling at 95 mph (miles per hour). .
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2023-12-05 22:01:00
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