Astronomers Have Tracked Down the Source of High Energy Cosmic Rays to Regions Within the Milky Way Itself

[Seldom Bucket]

Using a new observatory, a team of Chinese astronomers have found over a dozen sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. And those sources aren’t from some distant, exotic corner of the cosmos. They come from our own backyard.


Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR’s) are…pretty energetic, typically millions of times more energetic than our most powerful particle accelerators. They are also relatively rare, and so astronomers have had a hard time pinpointing their origins.


But a team of Chinese scientists led by Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences dug deep into the origins of UHECR’s using the recently-built Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). LHAASO is currently under construction in Daocheng in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, but the astronomers were able to use the completed half of the instrument for an 11-month observation run.



They found a dozen sources of UHECR’s, as well as some high-energy photons, including one with an energy of 1.4 Peta-electron volts (quadrillion electron-volts or PeV), the most energetic photon ever observed.

Astronomers Have Tracked Down the Source of High Energy Cosmic Rays to Regions Within the Milky Way Itself - Universe Today

Using a new observatory, a team of Chinese astronomers have found over a dozen sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays. And those sources aren’t from some distant, exotic corner of the cosmos. They come from our own backyard. Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR’s) are…pretty energetic...

www.universetoday.com