A message from the void (universe, mysteries)

[rjshae]

The Second Most Energetic Cosmic Ray Ever Found

This most recent detection is the second highest-energy cosmic ray ever detected and was detected in May 2021. This single proton had as much energy as dropping a brick on your foot from waist height: 240 exa–electron volts. It doesn’t rival the OMGP, but it’s more than a million times more energetic than anything our particle accelerators can generate.

The confounding thing about these high-energy particles is their source. While supernovae may be a source of some of them, there’s uncertainty if any supernovae are actually powerful enough to produce the most energetic ones. The most energetic cosmic particles are travelling so quickly and with so much energy that nothing should be able to affect their trajectory, not even magnetic fields. So scientists should be able to look backward along their path straight to their source. But this one looks like it came from a void. “Its arrival direction points back to a void in the large-scale structure of the Universe,” the authors write in their paper.

“These events seem like they’re coming from completely different places in the sky. It’s not like there’s one mysterious source,” said John Belz, professor at the University of Utah and co-author of the study. “It could be defects in the structure of spacetime, colliding cosmic strings. I mean, I’m just spit-balling crazy ideas that people are coming up with because there’s not a conventional explanation.”

Gotta love science mysteries.

[MalaMan]

The most energetic cosmic particles are travelling so quickly and with so much energy that nothing should be able to affect their trajectory, not even magnetic fields.

Well, those protons can not be travelling faster than 299,792,458 meters per second, of course...