Mysterious cosmic particle carrying extremely high energy falls to Earth

Hạt vũ trụ bí ẩn mang theo năng lượng cực cao rơi xuống trái đất - Ảnh 1. — Amataresu Particle Simulation

Scientists are scrambling to understand the origin of a powerful cosmic ray beam, which they believe carries a type of particle that originated outside the Milky Way before reaching Earth and falling in the US state of Utah.

Named Amaterasu, after the Japanese goddess of the sun, it is one of the most energetic particles from space ever detected falling to Earth's surface, according to a report published in the journal Science .

The origin of Amaterasu particles remains unknown, but experts believe that only the most powerful events in the universe, even much larger than a supernova explosion, could create such particles.

Professor John Matthews of the University of Utah (USA) commented: "Things that humans think are full of energy, like supernova explosions, still cannot create particles like Amaterasu".

The Amaterasu particle had an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), which is millions of times higher than the particles produced inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently the world's most powerful accelerator ever built.

This means that the energy coming from the Amaterasu particle is second only to the Oh-My-God particle, which was discovered in 1991 and carried 320 EeV of energy.

Professor Toshihiro Fujii of Osaka Metropolitan University (Japan) said that at the time of discovering Amaterasu particles, he thought there was a mistake when reading the results collected by the Telescope Array observatory in Utah (USA).

"When I first discovered this extremely high-energy cosmic ray, I thought there was a mistake, because the instrument showed the particle carrying the highest energy in the past three decades," said Professor Fujii.

The event is further mysterious because the Amaterasu particle appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty space bordering the Milky Way.

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