Scientists recently detected the most powerful energy rays ever emitted in the Milky Way, hundreds of times the energy that can be reached by man-made particle gas pedals on Earth and more than twice as much as the previous record holder.
The study, published April 5 in Physical Review Letters, announced “the first detection of diffuse gamma rays located in the Milky Way at energies between 100 trillion electron volts (TeV) and 1,000 trillion electron volts (PeV).”
In comparison, the most powerful particle gas pedal on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), can produce rays with an energy of only 6.5 TeV. This study detected rays with an energy of 957 TeV.
PeV is a thousand times more than TeV. A total of 23 diffuse gamma rays above 298 TeV and one close to 1 PeV were detected at the Cosmic Ray Observatory in the Tibetan town of Yangbajing. The observatory, located at an altitude of 4,300 meters above sea level, consists of an AS gamma surface array of more than 600 observers on the ground and a muon water Cherenkov detector underground.
For the past several decades, scientists have been recording high-energy gamma rays from cosmic space. They are presumed to be emitted by intense celestial events, such as stellar explosions and the ejection of matter from accretion disks around black holes.
Researchers have traced these rays to the Crab Nebula, but this is only an approximation and have not yet determined exactly what astronomical events are emitting these rays.
High-energy cosmic rays are composed of protons and other atomic remnants that are originally charged and are easily affected by different magnetic fields as they travel through the galaxy, bending their path. When these high-energy cosmic rays interact with the interstellar medium, they undergo nuclear reactions and become diffuse gamma rays, which are the ones received by scientists.
After they become gamma rays, they travel a little straighter within the galaxy, but by this stage, it is more difficult to trace its origin.
And it’s likely that the source of these PeV rays no longer exists. The next step, the researchers said, is to find the source of these events and learn whether they are still emitting rays or have calmed down.
Dead PeV rays are like extinct dinosaurs; we can only see the footprints they left over millions of years, all over the galaxy,” said Masato Takita of the Institute of Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo, one of the authors of the study. If we can locate the actual, still active PeV rays, we will be able to investigate much more.”
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