A look inside ALICE at the Large Hadron Collider. ALICE is one of the LHC's four particle detectors. Image: CERN/LHC
Recently astronomers caught a strange mystery: extremely high-energy particles spitting out of the surface of the Sun when it was relatively calm. Now a team of theorists have proposed a simple solution to the mystery. We just have to look a little bit under the surface.
In 2022 the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory detected a flash of extremely high gamma ray radiation coming from the disk of the sun. To generate that kind of radiation required a particle with TeV energies slamming into another particle.
In 2022 the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory detected a flash of extremely high gamma ray radiation coming from the disk of the sun. To generate that kind of radiation required a particle with TeV energies slamming into another particle.
This observation came on the heels of over six years worth of observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope in orbit of the Earth. That telescope found significant gamma ray detections also coming from the Sun.
Those detections were of lower energy than the HAWC results, but pointed in the same general direction. What was especially surprising about these observations was that these remarkably high-energy particles seemed to be emitted from the Sun when it was in a relatively quiet state.
Occasionally solar storms and flares rip across the surface of the Sun, and naturally these generate enormous amounts of energies which can easily create high-energy particles. But when the Sun is quiet it’s much harder to identify a sufficiently large source of energy to power these kinds of processes. READ MORE...
