Super-Stellar Accelerators!

Earth is under constant bombardment by energetic rays from ACROSS SPACE, but it's not time to thaw Buck Rogers just yet - the constant cosmic ray bombardment has always been going on, and now scientists have established where they're coming from.  The answer makes the Large Hadron Collider look like a scuba diver forgot to take a match out of his back pocket.

The energetic particles punching into our atmosphere every microsecond generate showers of exotic matter (including antimatter, for those who don't think that being shot at from outer space is cool enough).  Now NASA and the European Organization for Astronomical Research (ESO) have identified the cause: exploding stars.  Sorry, typo, that should read EXPLODING STARS!

Supernovae are the brightest event you can get in a universe short of beginning a new one, and the immense energy released by the utter collapse of the stellar core blasts the outer layers of the star itself off into space.  Much of this mass becomes an expanding cloud of super-heated material (thirty million degrees Celsius, for those who enjoy reading numbers that make absolutely no sense to humans), but by scanning the supernova cloud and the shockwaves plowing through it scientists have shown that a lot of the energy instead boosts individual particles into becoming cosmic rays.

Projected into space at close to the speed of light, most cosmic rays are protons (with about 10% hydrogen alh helium nuclei with a very few heavier elements and electrons thrown in).  These can travel immense distance - even over intergalactic voids - before slamming into an inconvenient anything-at-all and giving up their energy in a shower of particles.

This is amazing work, although unfortunately cosmic ray bombardment hasn't created any Fantastic Foursomes just yet.  At least that means there won't be another movie.

The image above is of Supernova 1604, also known as Kepler's Supernova -a supernova which occurred in the Milky Way, in the constellation Ophiuchus. As of 2009, it is the last supernova to have been unquestionably observed in our own galaxy, occurring no farther than 6 kiloparsecs or about 20,000 light-years from Earth.

Image Credit: HST/NASA/ESA.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Super-efficient Particle Accelerators

Comments

[Kunal]

"Supernovae are the brightest event you can get in a universe short of beginning a new one" I think this title goes to being in the line of sight of the Gamma Ray Burst and not a supernova explosion

[Narendra Nath]

i have always believed that the nature has provided us such wonderful natural accelerators that is mostly foolish and inhuman to spend huge amounts of money to build LHC accelerators such as the ones at Geneva and near Chicago. The outcome from them is hardly commensurate with the money spent. There are better objectives to provide relief to suffering humanity than build fancy accelerators on Earth.

[EvilCosmicMonkeyfrom Knoxville]

Nature almost always provides us with better models than any humanity could think up for itself. The supernova is naturally going to make something like the LHC look like a flashlight in the glare a searchlight.

[bitirim]

thank you

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