Japanese researchers have captured the second-most energetic cosmic rays they’ve seen to date, and they’ve named it Amaterasu in honor of the Japanese deity of the sunas the team explained in a scientific paper published today.
The lightning strike on Earth was captured on May 27, 2021, as part of the Array Telescope project by an international team led by Associate Professor Toshihiro Fujii of the School of Science and the Yoichiro Nambu Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics of Osaka Metropolitan University .
Until now, only one more powerful cosmic ray had been observed, in 1991: the one baptized as Oh-My-God, with an energy of 320 EeV.
The Cosmic rays are charged energy particles that come from galactic and extragalactic sources and can reach an energy of more than 1,018 electron volts. or one exa-electron volt (EeV), about a million times the power of the most powerful human-made particle accelerators.
Extremely high energy sources, such as Amaterasu, 244 EeV or the equivalent of 2.4 trillion times the energy of lightning from a conventional Earth storm, are exceptionally rare.
“When I first discovered these ultra-high energy cosmic rays, I thought there had been a mistake as it showed an energy level unprecedented in the past three decades,” Professor Fujii said in a statement published this Friday. the publication of the article in the journal Science.
The team has not been able to determine the origin of Amaterasu, but they hope that its discovery and study will pave the way to clarifying its origins and that of cosmic rays themselves.
“No promising astronomical object has been identified that matches the direction from which the cosmic rays arrived “suggests possibilities for unknown astronomical phenomena and new physical origins beyond the Standard Model.”he added.
Fujii noted that the team remains committed to the Array Telescope and wants to improve its capabilities in the future.
The Array Telescope is an experimental detector specialized in cosmic rays, launched in 2008 and consists of 507 stations of surface scintillators covering an area of 700 square kilometers in the US state of Utah. (JO)
Source: Eluniverso
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