11/24/2023 – 10:06
Astronomers have detected a rare and extremely high-energy particle falling from space to Earth, according to an article recently published in the journal Science. Named Amaterasu, in honor of the sun goddess in Japanese mythology, it is one of the highest energy cosmic rays ever detected by humans, according to scientists.
The origin of the particle is not yet known, but astronomers believe that it arose from “powerful” celestial events, as it has so much accumulated energy and is so rare. The study belongs to the University of Utah (USA), together with the University of Tokyo, Japan.
To give you an idea, Amaterasu has an energy greater than 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), a value millions of times greater than that of the particles placed in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built. It would be second only to the Oh-My-God particle, another very high-energy cosmic ray, which was detected in 1991 and had 320 EeV.
According to the authors of the study, formations that people consider energetic, such as supernovae, are far from having enough energy to generate such powerful particles. Extremely high magnetic fields are needed to confine the particle while it is accelerated to the point of accumulating such an energetic charge.
What is a cosmic ray?
A cosmic ray is a high-energy subatomic particle – usually a proton – that passes through space at close to the speed of light. The name, lightning, comes from the effect caused by this movement.
When the cosmic ray has energy levels that exceed one EeV – the value is about a million times higher than those achieved by the most powerful man-made particle accelerators – it is considered extremely high.
Lightning with energy greater than 100 EeV is rarely detected. The estimate is that, every century, less than one of these particles reaches each square kilometer of the Earth.
Discovery
Toshihiro Fujii, an astronomer at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, was doing a routine data check at the Telescope Array in Utah when signals suggested that the facility’s detectors had been destroyed by something super energetic. It was a surprise.
“I thought there was some kind of error or bug in the software,” Fujii told the magazine article Nature, which echoed the finding. However, the measurements were consistent with those produced by fairly high-energy cosmic rays, which generally travel through space smoothly, leading to the discovery.
Fujii and his team, according to the Nature, they even calculated the origin of the lightning in a region where few galaxies reside. They also tried to match the cosmic ray with possible source galaxies and objects located outside its direction of arrival, but none of them seemed to fit. “There was nothing,” Fujii told the magazine.
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