2023-11-24 19:36:29
Horrifying: “Amaterasu” creates a particle cascade and thus makes its presence felt in the “Telescope Array” in Utah. Image: Osaka Metropolitan University/L-INSIGHT, Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige
A particle from the cosmos is one of the most energetic ever seen. But where it came from, there is nothing that could have produced anything like that. The researchers are faced with a puzzle.
Forty joules is a lot of energy. Well, maybe not for people who know this size primarily from nutritional tables – there are 40 joules in a quarter of a gram of cucumber. Recreational shooters, on the other hand, may know that projectiles from over-the-counter air rifles can leave the muzzle with a maximum kinetic energy of 7.5 joules. Now such a projectile consists of more than ten to the power of twenty metal atoms. Now imagine a single such atom flying around at 40 joules. You can understand why such a high-energy particle is one of their own for the researchers at the “Telescope Array,” a detector field for cosmic particle radiation in the American state of Utah Specialist article was worth.
He now appeared in Science. The particle, which the team led by Toshihiro Fujii from Osaka Metropolitan University named “Amaterasu” after the Shinto sun goddess and founder of the Japanese imperial family, is not even a record holder. With around 40 joules or 244 exa-electron volts (EeV), it hit an air molecule in the Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of around ten kilometers over Utah on May 27, 2021, bursting and creating a shower of secondary particles that were detected by the telescope’s sensors spread over 700 square kilometers Array were registered. Electron volts (eV) is the unit in which particle energies are specified – 1 eV is the energy of an infrared light quantum – and “Exa” stands for a prefactor that exceeds “Tera” by another million. Just as a terabyte is a billion or ten to the power of nine bytes, 100 EeV is ten to the power of twenty eV.
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