An international team of astronomers believe they have solved a century-old mystery - the origin of the cosmic rays, after using 4 telescopes to create an image showing that the origin of the rays may be from the remnants of a supernova
Avi Blizovsky
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An international team of astronomers believes that they have solved a century-old mystery - the origin of cosmic rays. Using an array of four telescopes in Africa, scientists have produced the first image showing that the source of cosmic rays may be the remnants of a supernova, the powerful explosion of a star at the end of its life.
"This is the first time we were able to photograph the source," said David Berge, an astrophysicist from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. "Scientists believed for a long time that supernova explosions were indeed the source, but they had no supporting evidence," added Berg, who reported the findings in the scientific journal Nature.
He and his colleagues in the UK, Armenia, France, Ireland, Namibia, South Africa and the Czech Republic, studied the remains of a supernova whose aura reached Earth a thousand years ago and left a shell of fragments. "Because the energy density in cosmic rays is so great, they play an important role in the evolution of our galaxy. We are now at a stage where what we see can prove that cosmic rays come from supernova remnants," he added.
Prof. Ian Halliday, Head of the Department of Particle Physics and the Astronomical Research Council (PPARC), the foundation that financed the research, welcomed the findings: "These results provide the unequivocal proof that supernovae are capable of producing large amounts of cosmic rays that are scattered throughout the galaxy - something we suspected In it a long time ago, but we were never able to confirm."
Yadan Astrophysics 2 - stars and galaxies
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