LANL: Using Cosmic-Ray Neutron Bursts To Understand Gamma-Ray Bursts From Lightning … An Accidental Discovery Confirms What Simulations Show ladailypost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from ladailypost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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IMAGE: A lightning mapper at the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Cosmic Ray Observatory in Mexico unexpectedly observed that gamma rays produce more neutrons than previously known. view more
Credit: Jordan Goodman, HAWC Collaboration (NSF.gov)
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., April 28, 2021 Analysis of data from a lightning mapper and a small, hand-held radiation detector has unexpectedly shed light on what a gamma-ray burst from lightning might look like - by observing neutrons generated from soil by very large cosmic-ray showers. The work took place at the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Cosmic Ray Observatory in Mexico. This was an accidental discovery, said Greg Bowers, a scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory and lead author of the study published in
March 17, 2021
New research solves a decades-long riddle: from where do the highest-energy cosmic rays originate? Even supernovae – exploding stars – can’t explain them. Now it seems these sorts of cosmic rays may come from clusters of young, hot, massive stars.
Cygnus OB2 is the nearest star-forming region to us. It’s what’s called an OB association, meaning it contains some of the most massive and luminous stars known. Scientists found cosmic rays of the highest energies to originate from this region of space. The colors – green to yellow to red – represent high-energy gamma-ray emission as seen by the HAWC observatory, overlaid on an infrared image from the Spitzer telescope (the white regions). Image via B. Hona (HAWC Collaboration)/ Hora et. al (Spitzer)/ Los Alamos National Laboratory.
12 March 2021, 10:42 am EST By
Researchers involved in the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory were in for a surprise after the discovery that the cosmic rays bouncing towards Earth do not originate from a supernova.
The observatory, based in Puebla, Mexico, uses huge metallic tanks containing water in the process.
The Contribution of the HAWC Observatory
The common notion in science is that cosmic rays came from supernovas. They are the fast-moving, high-energy protons and atomic nuclei that travel to Earth. The solar system housed them through millions of galaxies in outer space.
It is believed that rays come from stars that form a supernova. The latter takes place when the stars expand to the point where they would explode. This is because they could not hold any more of their cores for support, Independent reported.
An infrared image of dust clouds in the Cocoon nebula captured by NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope. An overlay (in green to yellow to red) indicates rgions of gamma-ray emissions where cosmic rays may be generated. Image: TeV: Binita Hona (HAWC Collaboration), IR: Hora et. al, Spitzer’s Growing Legacy, ASP Conference Series, 2010, P. Ogle, ed.
Conventional wisdom holds that high-energy cosmic rays crashing into Earth’s atmosphere at the speed of light, triggering showers of cascading particles, are generated in powerful supernova blasts.
Not so fast, researchers say.
As it turns out, supernovae, which do indeed generate high-energy gamma rays, are not powerful enough to explain the petaelectronvolt (PeV) energies observed with the most extreme cosmic ray events. Instead of supernovae, new research suggests, star clusters featuring closely packed type O and type B stars are responsible, acting as so-called PeVatron accelerators.