A particle of unknown origin falls to Earth and arouses the curiosity of astronomers

The discovery of a rare object has sparked the interest of astronomers around the world energy An extremely high beam fell to Earth in 2021. The cosmic ray is called Amaterasu, and it comes from an apparently empty part of space.

The name is in honor of the sun goddess in Japanese mythology. This is not surprising, as the energy produced by the particle is enormous, in a way that only very few cosmic events, such as the explosion of a star, can produce.

what do you want to know?

• A mysterious particle has been discovered on Earth
• Coming from a seemingly empty place in space
• Few objects are capable of producing such a large amount of energy

“Things that people think are active, like supernovas, don’t have enough energy to do that,” said Professor John Matthews, from the University of Utah and co-author of the study published in the journal Science describing the discovery.

To make the particle’s appearance even more complex, it comes from an empty place in space, on the border of our galaxy. “If we traced it back to its origin, there would be nothing active enough to produce it,” the professor added.

A mysterious particle comes from an empty part of the universe

Detected by Array telescopein Utah (USA), and was also analyzed in Osaka University, in Japan in 2021, but it has not been revealed to the world until now. It took Toshihiro Fujii, the professor responsible for the analysis, some time to get an idea of ​​what was happening initially. “When I first discovered this ultra-energy cosmic ray, I thought there must be a mistake, as it showed an energy level unprecedented in the past three decades,” he said.

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What could produce such a charged particle of energy? One of the hypotheses proposed is black holes. But not just any hole, such an event could be an echo of a supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy.

Around these objects, matter is flung through the universe at nearly the speed of light. This type of ray can be detected with telescopes here on Earth, but the problem in Amaterasu’s case is that when the path is traced back to its source, it leads nowhere.

Scientists suggest that this may indicate a much larger magnetic aberration than expected, an unknown source in the local vacuum, or an incomplete understanding of the physics of high-energy particles.

No promising astronomical objects have been identified that match the direction from which the cosmic ray arrived, suggesting the possibility of unknown astronomical phenomena and new physical origins outside the Standard Model.

Toshihiro Fuji