Astronomy

There are many mysterious things in space that researchers have not discovered and many that they don’t understand. One of the most confusing to them is the ultra high-energy cosmic rays. At this time 370 scientists and engineers from 17 different countries have gathered together in a group known as the Pierre Auger Collaboration. They have stated that they finally have evidence explaining what these phenomenons are. They are super-massive black holes that rumble at the hearts of many galaxies, crushing stars and gas out of existence and spewing jets of radiation and subatomic particles into intergalactic space.

Using a new array of cosmic ray detectors known as the Pierre Auger Observatory, which is spread over an area the size of Rhode Island near Malargüe, in the pampas of Argentina, the scientists traced some of the highest-energy cosmic rays back to the vicinities of nearby galaxies bubbling with black hole fireworks, so-called active galaxies. “The age of cosmic-ray astronomy has arrived,” said James Cronin, a Nobel-prize winning physicist at the University of Chicago and the co-founder of the Auger observatory. “We’re really just getting started,” he added in an interview.

Each of the cosmic rays studied had energy in excess of 57 billion billion electron volts, about the energy of a nicely hit tennis ball. By comparison, the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva, will accelerate protons to a mere 7 trillion electron volts when it turns on next summer. “Such energies are so extreme that they could arise in only the most violent places in the universe,” the authors of the report wrote.

Because such active galaxies trace the general distribution of matter in the local universe, Dr. Cronin and others cautioned, the cosmic rays could originate with other objects, but the black holes’ known tendency toward violence makes them prime suspects. The important thing, Dr. Cronin said, is that for the first time researchers have shown that the high-energy rays do not come uniformly from all directions in the sky.

Until now, cosmic rays, which are often electrically charged particles like protons or atomic nuclei, have seemed to come from everywhere. Because magnetic fields bend the paths of charged particles after the particles are spit from the sun or some distant exploding star, they wander in curved, meandering paths, erasing the direction of their origins. They move under the influence of galactic and even intergalactic magnetic fields before smashing into our atmosphere and causing a cascade of other particles that eventually trigger detectors on the ground.

It seems though that ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have so much energy that magnetic fields can barely nudge them and the galaxy cannot hold them. That is why when they hit Earth they should point to within a few degrees like bullets back to their origins.