In a record-breaking discovery, scientists detected our very own sun emitting a rare amount of gamma rays — wavelengths of sunshine known to hold the most energy of another wavelength within the electromagnetic spectrum. This is kind of a giant deal because it marks the highest-energy radiation to ever be documented coming from our planet’s host star.
Something like 1 trillion electron volts, to be exact.
“After taking a look at six years’ value of information, out popped this excess of gamma rays,” Meher Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University and co-author of a brand new paper in regards to the findings released Wednesday (Aug. 3), said in a press release. “After we first saw it, we were like, ‘We definitely messed this up. The sun can’t be this vibrant at these energies.'”
Upon deliberation, nevertheless, the team realized that such brightness definitely existed — and it was simply because of the sheer amount of gamma rays the sun appeared to be spitting out.
“The sun is more surprising than we knew,” Nisa said.
Before you begin worrying, no, these rays cannot harm us. But what they will do is have a fairly vital ripple effect for the longer term of solar physics. In truth, they’ve already raised some vital questions on the sun, similar to what role its magnetic field might play within the newly observed gamma-ray phenomenon.
Related: Scientists can have just cracked the sun’s best mystery
It’s all because of a novel lens on the cosmos called the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC. Briefly, this observatory, accomplished within the spring of 2015, is a facility specifically designed to watch particles related to very high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays, the latter of that are equally energetic but additionally mysterious in that they often travel across the universe without exhibiting a transparent start line.
“On this particular energy regime, other ground-based telescopes couldn’t have a look at the sun because they only work at night,” Nisa said. “Ours operates 24/7.”
HAWC mainly uses a network of 300 large water tanks, a press release on the brand new study explains. Each of those tanks is crammed with about 200 metric tons of purified water, they usually all sit nestled between two dormant volcano peaks in Mexico greater than 13,000 feet (3,962 meters) above sea level. All of this purified water is essential because, as high-energy particles from space strike the liquid, the collision ends in a phenomenon often known as Cherenkov radiation (which you might have heard of in case you’ve watched the TV show “Chernobyl”).
Named after 1958 Physics Nobel Prize laureate Pavel Cherenkov, Cherenkov radiation essentially refers to a bluish glow that happens when electrically charged particles move at a certain speed through a certain medium, on this case water.
Tapping into this idea, HAWC’s overall field of view covers 15% of the sky, allowing it to survey a complete two-thirds every 24 hour period and determine the roots of assorted high-energy particles headed to Earth.
What’s normal solar radiation like?
Regardless that scientists have observed the sun sending out gamma ray emissions before, such observations are connected to incredibly extreme solar events similar to super powerful solar flares. The recent gamma-ray discovery doesn’t appear to be related to that sort of scenario.
Inside the sun, nuclear fusion processes are also expected to provide these strong wavelengths, nevertheless, gamma rays created that way don’t exactly make it out of the star — let alone far enough to be detected by Earth-based instruments.
As an alternative, more often than not, what we see radiating out from our host star are infrared wavelengths, ultraviolet wavelengths and, after all, visible wavelengths that we are able to see with the unaided eye.
For context, considered one of those visible wavelengths carries an energy of about 1 electron volt. The gamma rays Nisa and fellow researchers witnessed, against this, exuded about 1 trillion electron volts. And, there have been plenty of them.
The primary time scientists observed gamma rays with energies of greater than a billion electron volts, in line with the discharge, was in 2011 with NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. But Fermi had a limit. It maxed out at finding gamma rays with about 200 billion electron volts. So in 2015, the brand new study’s research team began collecting gamma ray data with HAWC as this observatory didn’t appear to have the identical restriction.
“They nudged us and said, ‘We’re not seeing a cutoff. You may have the ability to see something,” Nisa said.
Which brings us to the current — the primary time we have seen sun rays with energies extending right into a trillion electron volts. And, in line with Nisa, that doesn’t look like the utmost.
“We thought we had this star found out, but that is not the case.”
The paper was published Thursday (Aug. 3) within the journal Physical Review Letters