#PICTURES OF BLACK LIGHTNING CRACK#

#PICTURES OF BLACK LIGHTNING CRACK#

The Telescope Array is in the middle of an expansion that that astronomers hope will help crack the case. Its location in Utah’s West Desert provides ideal atmospheric conditions in two ways: the dry air is crucial because humidity will absorb the ultraviolet light necessary for detection and the region’s dark skies are essential, as light pollution will create too much noise and obscure the cosmic rays. It sits at about 1,200m (4,000ft), the elevation sweet spot that allows secondary particles maximum development, but before they start to decay. The Telescope Array is uniquely positioned to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. I mean, I’m just spitballing crazy ideas that people are coming up with because there’s not a conventional explanation.”

“It could be defects in the structure of spacetime, colliding cosmic strings. It’s not like there’s one mysterious source,” said Prof John Belz of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper. “These events seem like they’re coming from completely different places in the sky. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. For more information see our Privacy Policy. Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. Scientists suggest this could indicate a much larger magnetic deflection than predicted, an unidentified source in the Local Void, or an incomplete understanding of high-energy particle physics. Similarly, the Oh-My-God particle had no discernible source. Tracing its trajectory backwards points towards empty space. But particles with Oh-My-God or Amaterasu-level energy would be expected to blast through intergalactic space relatively unbent by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields, meaning it should be possible to trace their origin. In the vicinity of these vast entities, matter is stripped back to its subatomic structures and protons, electrons and nuclei are hurled out across the universe at nearly the speed of light.Ĭosmic rays, echoes of such violent celestial events, rain down on to Earth nearly constantly and can be detected by instruments, such as the Telescope Array observatory in Utah, which found the Amaterasu particle.īelow a certain energy threshold, the flight path of these particles resembles a ball in a pinball machine as they zigzag against the electromagnetic fields through the cosmic microwave background. Toshihiro Fujii, an associate professor at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan, said: “When I first discovered this ultra-high-energy cosmic ray, I thought there must have been a mistake, as it showed an energy level unprecedented in the last three decades.”Ī potential candidate for this level of energy would be a super-massive black hole at the heart of another galaxy. “You need huge amounts of energy, really high magnetic fields, to confine the particle while it gets accelerated.” “Things that people think of as energetic, like supernova, are nowhere near energetic enough for this,” said Matthews. It comes only second to the Oh-My-God particle, another ultra-high-energy cosmic ray that came in at 320 EeV, detected in 1991. The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts (EeV), millions of times more than particles produced in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful accelerator ever built, and equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph. “That’s the mystery of this – what the heck is going on?” “You trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it,” said Prof John Matthews, of the University of Utah and a co-author of the paper in the journal Science that describes the discovery.

But Amaterasu appears to have emerged from the Local Void, an empty area of space bordering the Milky Way galaxy. Only the most powerful cosmic events, on scales far exceeding the explosion of a star, are thought to be capable of producing such energetic particles.

Pictures of black lightning