When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.On Earth, the Large Hadron Collider can smash atoms together and accelerate particles to near light speeds — but in space, there are high-energy cosmic rays with over 10 million times more power than even those zippy particles. And now, new research suggests such cosmic rays may hide a secret that is the key to unlocking a 60-year-old space puzzle.One of these cosmic rays for instance, dubbed the Amaterasu particle (after the Japanese sun goddess) slammed into Earth in 2021 with an energy 40 million times greater than particles slammed together at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Amaterasu is considered the second most powerful cosmic ray ever detected — after the aptly named “Oh-My-God particle” detected back in 1991. However, the origins of these particles, and the sources that accelerated them to such high energies, are shrouded in mystery.AdvertisementAdvertisementTraveling with the kinetic energy equivalent to that of a fast-moving tennis ball (a lot for a single cosmic-ray particle), the Amaterasu deepened that mystery as it appears to have originated from a void-like region with no obvious source. However, researchers finally think they may have hit upon an answer. A new study’s team thinks the highest-energy cosmic rays may actually be atomic nuclei of elements heavier than iron. Could this be the missing link in our understanding of which mysterious violent events fling these intense particles toward Earth?”The origins and acceleration mechanisms of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have been among the biggest mysteries in the field for more than 60 years, since the first example was reported,” team leader Kohta Murase, of Penn State’s Eberly College of Science, said in a statement. “Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays can only be accelerated by some of the most powerful sources in the universe. When we detect individual cosmic-ray particles such as the Amaterasu particle here on Earth, we can often use their energies, arrival directions, and expected magnetic deflections to infer their possible cosmic sources.”Many sources have been proposed as the origins of high-energy cosmic rays, including the collapse of a massive star to form a neutron star or a black hole or the collision of two neutron stars themselves. For context, the matter that composes neutron stars is so dense that if a mere teaspoon of it were brought to Earth, it would weigh about 10 million tons, which is the same as 85,000 adult blue whales (try getting them on one teaspoon).So, compressing a body with the mass of the sun to a width of around 12 miles (20 kilometers) is already incredibly violent — consider two of those compressed bodies meeting.AdvertisementAdvertisement”These highest-energy cosmic rays are thought to come from extreme astrophysical sources, like two neutron stars colliding or a massive star collapsing,” Murase said. “For many cosmic-ray events taken together, their energy distribution, arrival-direction pattern, and statistically inferred composition provide important clues about where these particles come from and how they are accelerated.”If Murase and fellow researchers are correct that cosmic rays may be the nuclei of elements heavier than iron, then this neutron star collision story may have some …
