Russian scientists from the Institute for Nuclear Research (INR) of the Russian Academy of Sciences have identified a cosmic particle with incredibly high energy, recorded by the Telescope Array in the American state of Utah in May 2021. socialbites.ca was informed about this by the press service of the scientific institution.
The international Telescope Array collaboration brings together researchers from the United States, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Belgium.
The discovered element had a charge of 2.44⋅1020 electron volts; this was approximately 2.3 million times higher than the maximum energy achievable in the most powerful particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider.
The origin of such high-energy particles is believed to be associated with the largest processes in the Universe – the ejection of supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, gamma-ray bursts, etc. – believed to be related.
Following the discovery of an event with record energy in the last 30 years, Russian experts subjected the event to careful analysis.
“The signal from all stations of the ground-based Telescope Array detector array was examined using machine learning methods: it was determined with a high degree of confidence that the particle cannot be a gamma quantum, which does not allow it to be unambiguously correlated. “With any process outside the Standard Model of physics particles,” Ivan Kharuk, a researcher at the INR RAS Big Data Processing Laboratory, explains to socialbites.ca.
Scientists believe that the particle found may be a proton or the nucleus of an atom of a chemical element. Further research showed that it came to Earth from an empty part of the Universe. This suggests that the object is very strongly deflected from a source located outside our galaxy but relatively close to its boundaries.
Researchers do not rule out that the particle may have reached Earth due to some yet unknown astronomical events or undiscovered physical principles.
Further study of the particle’s propagation throughout the Universe using computer simulations will make it possible to limit the range of possible sources of all ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
INR RAS stated that recording and studying such events would help solve a number of fundamental problems in modern physics.
Previous scientists discovered Powerful neutrino sources targeting Earth.