Astronomers around the world have been intrigued by the detection of a rare and extremely high-energy particle that hit Earth in 2021. A cosmic ray, struck by Amaterasu, sees a seemingly empty part of the universe.
The name is a tribute to the sun goddess in Japanese mythology. Not at all, the energy produced by the particle is enormous, in a way that very few cosmic events like the explosion of a star are able to produce.
Or what do you need to know?
- A mysterious particle has been discovered on Earth
- Vinda from an apparently empty space
- Few objects are capable of producing very large amounts of energy
“Things that people think of as energetic, like supernovae, don’t have enough energy to do that,” said John Matthews, a professor at the University of Utah and co-author of a paper published in the journal Science, which is out now.
To make the origin of the particle even more complicated, we see an apparently empty space that points towards the border with our galaxy. “We are following your trajectory to the origin, there is nothing energetic enough to produce,” concluded the professor.
The mysterious particle comes from an empty part of the universe
The detection was made using an array of telescopes in Utah (USA) and was also analyzed at Osaka University in Japan in 2021, but has only now been revealed to the world. Toshihiro Fujii, the professor in charge of the analysis, took a moment to get an idea of what was happening next. “When I first discovered this ultra-high-energy cosmic ray, I thought there must have been a mistake because it showed a level of energy unprecedented in the last three decades,” he said.
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What could a particle with such charged energy produce? One of the hypotheses raised is in our black bureaucracy. But not just any black hole, an event of this type could be an echo from a supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy.
Around these objects, matter moves through space at the speed of light. This type of radiation can be detected by telescopes here on Terra, but the problem with Amateras isn’t that it leads to nowhere when following the trajectory at its source.
The researchers suggest that this could mean a much larger magnetic deviation than expected, an unidentified source in the local vacuum, or an incomplete understanding of high-energy particle physics.
There is no promising astronomical object matching the wave direction or cosmic radius that has been identified, suggesting the possibility of unknown astronomical phenomena and a new physical origin other than Padrão’s model
Toshihiro Fujii