Discover the origin of the mysterious cosmic rays

Scientists have finally solved the mystery of the strongest cosmic rays attacking the Earth. The strange thing is that these rays never came from the Milky Way, but from other distant galaxies.

The secrets hidden in cosmic rays have confounded scientists for the past 50 years, and this new research will be the first solid foundation to understand their origins.

Through research, scientists have discovered that subatomic particles in cosmic rays often visit Earth with 'homeland' outside the galaxy . This is somewhat similar to the long-held speculations of the scientific world.

The study was conducted in collaboration with the Pierre Auger Observatory, which has the largest cosmic ray detector in the world and more than 400 scientists from 18 countries.

A spokesman for the research group - Professor Karl-Heinz Kampert of the Wuppertal University of Germany, said: "We have come very close to decoding the mysteries of origin as well as the way in which strange particles are This is a question that has caused astronomers a headache so far. '

Energy-rich cosmic rays are radiation made up of protons and nuclei of elements such as hydrogen and iron. They travel everywhere in the universe with extremely fast speeds - only losing the speed of light. These cosmic rays have millions of times the energy that scientists generate from nuclear accelerators (LHCs).

Discover the origin of cosmic rays.(Photo: Pierre Auger Observatory).

These cosmic rays rarely reach Earth. The proportion of cosmic rays that attack our planet is about 1 per km ² per year. This means that, to accurately detect them in order to study the nature of cosmic rays, we need an extremely large observatory.

Observatory Auger Pierre has a view of about 3,000 km ² , estimating its width by Yosemite National Park (USA). Inside the observatory's covered area, the researchers placed 1,600 detectors to detect immediately when a cosmic ray reached the Earth's atmosphere.

These rays when arriving at Earth create a beam of protons, electrons and muons, which form a giant disk and interact with each other within a few kilometers in diameter. These collisions will be collected by a number of individual detectors.

After more than 12 years of hard work, the team discovered more than 30,000 cosmic rays - and found something odd: some cosmic rays came from a particular direction than others. The strange thing is that this path contains materials of other galaxies with dense density.

Researcher Bruce Dawson, a professor at the University of Adelaide's High Energy Physics Group, said: "This result clearly shows the origin of the particles being outside the Milky Way. This is a result. very interesting and also the result of many years of hard work of researchers ".

'It is the first evidence to conclude that atomic materials - not just the light of stars, traveling to Earth from distant galaxies in the universe,' he added.

Cosmic rays have many mysteries.(Photo: Internet).

We still don't know exactly how cosmic rays are created. Some scientists hypothesize that it is made up of super-heavy black holes, galactic collisions, gamma-ray bursts and supernova explosions.

No hypothesis has been proven, but studying cosmic rays is still extremely useful. They help us understand the composition of galaxies, the process that motivates the particles to achieve extremely fast speeds like today, and even understanding the formation of nuclei.

The study was published in the journal Science.

Subatomic particles are a concept that refers to particles that constitute atoms, along with particles released in nuclear reactions or decay reactions, for example, electrons, protons, neutrons.