An international team of researchers have released a study claiming they've discovered that extreme energy cosmic rays are generated near the Big Dipper.
Hanyang University made an announcement this week, confirming that the discovery was made by a joint research team called "Telescope Array," which included 125 Korean, Japanese, US and Russian scientists.
A new study identifying a hotspot in the northern sky for ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays was accepted for publication by Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This puts us closer to finding out the sources - but no cigar yet," says University of Utah physicist Gordon Thomson, spokesman and co-principal investigator for the $25 million Telescope Array cosmic ray observatory west of Delta, Utah. It is the Northern Hemisphere's largest cosmic ray detector.
The scientists set up the biggest observatory in the northern hemisphere with 500 particle detectors and 3 large telescopes in the Utah desert of the U.S., according to a recent study.
Cosmic rays were first discovered back in 1912.
Thomson and a number of other physicists feel that ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays are just protons, though some believe they include nitrogen nuclei and helium as well.
Possible sources include active galactic nuclei, gamma ray emitters, noisy radio galaxies, and shock waves from colliding galaxies.
Ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays come from beyond the Milky Way, which is 100,000 light years wide. Ninety percent of them come from within 300 million light years because powerful cosmic rays from greater distances are weakened by interaction with cosmic microwave background radiation, according to Charlie Jui, a University of Utah professor of physics and astronomy.
"All we see is a blob in the sky, and inside this blob there is all sorts of stuff - various types of objects - that could be the source (of the rays)," said Thomson. "Now we know where to look."
The most powerful or highest-energy cosmic ray ever measured was detected over Utah in 1991 by the University of Utah's Fly's Eye observatory at the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground.
The team discovered that 19 of them are created near the Big Dipper, based on observations of 72 cosmic rays.
The Telescope Array, built for $17 million, started operations in 2008. It was later upgraded, bringing the cost to about $25 million.
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