The Galaxy’s Secret Particle Accelerators: 70-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery Finally Unlocked
For seven decades, astronomers have stared at a jagged line in the data, baffled. A mysterious “knee” in the energy spectrum of cosmic rays—high-speed particles constantly bombarding Earth—has defied explanation since the 1950s. We knew something terrifyingly powerful was out there, accelerating matter to mind-bending speeds, but the usual suspects simply didn’t fit the profile. Now, the smoking gun has finally been found, and the culprit is far more violent than an exploding star. The answer lies within the voracious appetite of the universe’s ultimate monsters: Micro-quasars.
Textbooks have long suggested that supernova remnants were the primary factories for these cosmic rays. Yet, the math never quite added up; these stellar explosions simply lacked the raw power to push particles past the extreme energy limit known as the “knee” (around 3 PeV). The question remained: what in the Milky Way is strong enough to act as a PeV-scale particle accelerator?
Enter the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). Their groundbreaking data has shifted the paradigm entirely. They have identified specific micro-quasars—binary systems where a black hole ruthlessly strips matter from a companion star—as the galaxy’s hidden super-accelerators. Systems like SS 433 are acting as natural particle colliders on a galactic scale. As the black hole feeds, it launches relativistic jets of plasma that accelerate protons to energies millions of times greater than anything the Large Hadron Collider could ever achieve.
This discovery confirms that where supernovas run out of steam, black holes take over. The 70-year-old puzzle is solved: we now know exactly what is firing the highest-energy bullets in the Milky Way, forever changing our understanding of the violent physics governing our galaxy.
Source: SciTechDaily
Gold Isn’t What We Thought: Scientists Unveil a Mind-Bending New Atomic Phase Under Extreme Pressure
The Galaxy’s Secret Particle Accelerators: 70-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery Finally Unlocked