Kazumasa Kawata of the University of Tokyo’s Cosmic Ray Research Institute in Kashiwa, Japan, said the findings would “provide new insights into the distribution, interaction processes and origins of the highest-energy cosmic rays in our galaxy.”
The highest-energy cosmic rays ever detected carry over a quintillion electron volts—equivalent to the kinetic energy of a baseball moving at 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), or millions of times more energetic than the particles created in the largest particle collider on Earth.
Today, scientists still don’t have a clear answer to where cosmic rays actually come from. Because they consist mainly of protons, their electrically charged nature means they don’t move in a straight line, instead being deflected by the universe’s magnetic fields. This means that key information about their birthplace is lost by the time they arrive on Earth, Kawata writes.
So by studying the number, distribution, and energy spectrum of these gamma rays, scientists can gain insight into the origins of cosmic radiation.
China and European scientists will develop the most sensitive space telescope of its kind
China and European scientists will develop the most sensitive space telescope of its kind
Because of the limited sensitivity of detectors, past observations of the Milky Way’s gamma-ray nebula were mostly made by space telescopes at energies below one trillion electron volts.
When LHAASO is completed in 2021, it will become the world’s largest and most sensitive observatory for detecting gamma rays and cosmic rays at ultrahigh energies. A major component of LHAASO is called the Square Kilometer Array, or KM2A, comprising about 5,200 surface electromagnetic detectors and nearly 1,200 underground muon detectors.
The researchers first ruled out dozens of point—rather than diffuse—gamma-ray sources in the galaxy. They then made one of the most comprehensive and precise measurements of the gamma-ray distribution over a wide energy range of 0.1-1 PeV and over a large part of the galaxy, including both the inner and outer galactic planes.
To their surprise, the number of diffuse gamma rays measured by LHAASO was two to three times higher than predicted cosmic ray collisions with the interstellar gas.
China is building the world’s largest deep-sea telescope to search for cosmic neutrinos
China is building the world’s largest deep-sea telescope to search for cosmic neutrinos
Also contrary to expectations, the energy spectrum of the gamma emission can be expressed by a single power law without any discontinuity, contradicting a popular theory that ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays will be trapped by the galaxy’s magnetic fields for a long time, somewhere between 10 000 to 10 million years before they finally escaped the basin.
“The discrepancy suggests that either additional gamma-ray sources are hidden in our galaxy, or cosmic ray densities change depending on location in our galaxy,” said Kawata, who worked on a China-Japan collaboration project called Tibet AS-gamma experiment for many years.
Kawata pointed out that it would be important for the world’s major cosmic ray detectors to mutually confirm the results of their observations in the future.
For example, a recent map of the Milky Way galaxy published by the US-led IceCube collaboration, which studies cosmic neutrinos from thousands of meters below the South Pole, provided strong evidence for interactions between cosmic rays and interstellar gas.
By putting these pieces together, scientists should be able to gain great insight into the mysterious origins of cosmic radiation, he said.