Toshihiro Fujii, an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, said: “When I first discovered this ultra-high-energy cosmic ray, I thought there must have been a mistake, as it showed an energy level unprecedented in the last three decades.”Ī potential candidate for this level of energy would be a super-massive black hole at the heart of another galaxy. “You need huge amounts of energy, really high magnetic fields, to confine the particle while it gets accelerated.” “Things that people think of as energetic, like supernova, are nowhere near energetic enough for this,” said Matthews. It comes only second to the Oh-My-God particle, another ultra-high-energy cosmic ray that came in at 320 EeV, detected in 1991. The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, and equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph. “That’s the mystery of this – what the heck is going on?” “You trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it,” said Prof John Matthews, of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper in the journal Science that describes the discovery. But Amaterasu appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy. Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |