depict yourself at an amusement car park , hitting one of those boxing colonnade simple machine . believe of the energy of that punch . Now imagine present that energy to a single particle , which traveled across infinite from the local nullity and slammed into our major planet ’s atmosphere , showering theTelescope Array detectorin secondary particles .
The corpuscle was called Amaterasu , after the Nipponese goddess of the Sun . It is an Ultra - high - vigor cosmic ray ( UHECRs ) , a subatomic atom with electric charge that was accelerated to incredible energies . Only one particle has been bang to have a higher vigour since we start to study these events , the Oh - My - God particle notice in 1991 .
“ When I first identify this ultra - high - energy cosmic ray , I thought there must have been a mistake , as it register an vitality level unprecedented in the last three decade , ” co - author Professor Toshihiro Fujii , from the Osaka Metropolitan University , said in astatement .
Amaterasu hit the atmosphere producing a rain of particles spotted by the detector.Image Credit: Osaka Metropolitan University/L-INSIGHT, Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige
ordinarily , it is hard to make compare between the energy of the particles in our particle gas and thing we have verbatim experience with . Amaterasu and Oh - My - God make it very easy . They have 100 million times the vigour of proton in the large hadron collider . Amaterasu had an vitality of 244 Exaelectronvolts ; Oh - my - god had an energy of 320 Exaelectronvolts . That ’s equivalent to the aforementioned punch , dropping a brick onto your toe from shank height , or of a baseball game in flying .
The unbelievable muscularity mean that it about came in a uncoiled line to Earth – nothing to block it – and this is a trouble , because at the other last , there is literally nothing .
“ The atom are so eminent energy , they should n’t be affected by galactic and spare - galactic magnetised fields . You should be able-bodied to channelize to where they come from in the sky , ” cobalt - generator John Matthews , Telescope Array co - spokesperson at the University of Utah , say in astatement .
“ But in the slip of the Oh - My - God mote and this new particle , you hound its flight to its source and there ’s nothing gamey vigor enough to have produced it . That ’s the whodunit of this – what the heck is survive on ? ”
Amaterasu comes from the Local Void , a realm of infinite that might reach out for about 200 million unclouded - years and whose center is at least 75 million light - age from Earth . As the name suggests , it is a mostly empty realm , with far fewer galaxies than the relief of the local macrocosm .
But something must have give rise the Oh - My - God and the Amaterasu mote . The two were detected using different watching techniques . Amaterasu thanks to the Telescope Array located in the Utah desert . These particle are rare but they are emphatically actual .
“ These events seem like they ’re come from completely different billet in the sky . It ’s not like there ’s one secret source , ” added John Belz , prof at the University of Utah and co - author of the work . “ It could be defects in the anatomical structure of spacetime , colliding cosmic string . I think of , I ’m just spit - balling mad idea that people are coming up with because there ’s not a conventional account . ”
We have come across some astronomers start taking bets on the possible sources ( if someone has the betting odds on magnetars , countenance us know ) . The Telescope Array is being lucubrate and research worker are bright that they ’ll name more of these extreme atom and possibly their origin too .
A newspaper describing the discovery is published in the journalScience .
