Japanese and American scientists who are investigating the mysterious origins of powerful cosmic rays have discovered an extremely rare ultra-high-energy particle that they believe came to Earth from beyond the Milky Way – .
“Oh My God” and “Amaterasu”
First things first.
In 1991, scientists from the University of Utah discovered an exceptionally high-energy cosmic ray particle as part of the “Fly’s Eye” experiment. Scientists were so surprised by it that they called it “Oh My God”. “This particle, most likely a proton, had an energy of as much as 3.2 x 1020 eV, or 320 Eev (320 exaelectronvolts)” – . Its source could not have been any object in our galaxy. Moreover, “Oh my God” had greater energy than that allowed for cosmic rays from other galaxies – in other words, such particles should not exist. Meanwhile, in the latest issue of the journal “Science”, scientists from Japan and the USA report that in May 2021, thanks to the Telescope Array detector network in Utah, another cosmic particle with an energy of 240 EeV was discovered. Which is just a little less than “Oh my God.”
Scientists named it after the Japanese sun goddess – “Amaterasu”. Low-energy cosmic rays can come from the Sun, but extremely high-energy cosmic rays are an exception. Therefore, among others these last two discoveries received their names. The Telescope Array system in Utah has been operating since 2008 and has so far detected 30 such rays, but none of them was as “energetic” as the recent “Amaterasu”. Such phenomena reach Earth very rarely. They are believed to appear once a century in a given square kilometer.
Scientist: What the hell is going on?
Despite years of research, the exact origins of these high-energy particles are still unclear. They are thought to be associated with the most energetic phenomena in the universe, such as black holes, gamma-ray bursts and active galactic nuclei. “It seems to have come from the Local Void – a gigantic empty space with a diameter measured in millions of light years. It contains only a few galaxies. And nothing that could be the source of a particle with an energy of 240 EeV” – we read in “National Geographic”.
– An ultra-high-energy cosmic ray carries tens of millions of times more energy than any man-made particle accelerator, such as the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, explained Glennys Farrar, a physics professor at New York University, in an interview with CNN. John Matthews, co-author of the study, added that these particles have such high energy that we should know where they come from. – But in the case of the “Oh my God” particle and this new one, you follow their trajectories to the source, and there is nothing high enough in energy to produce them. There is a void there. So what the hell is going on? – the scientist wondered. It seems that we are dealing with a cosmic phenomenon and the mystery has not yet been solved by researchers.
Source: Gazeta
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