Scientists Discover The Highest-Energy Light Coming From The Sun
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
"The sun is more surprising than we knew," said Mehr Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University. "We thought we had this star figured out, but that's not the case."
Nisa, who will soon be joining [Michigan State University's] faculty, is the corresponding author of a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters that details the discovery of the highest-energy light ever observed from the sun.
The international team behind the discovery also found that this type of light, known as gamma rays, is surprisingly bright. That is, there's more of it than scientists had previously anticipated.
Although the high-energy light doesn't reach the Earth's surface, these gamma rays create telltale signatures that were detected by Nisa and her colleagues working with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC.
[...] "We now have observational techniques that weren't possible a few years ago," said Nisa, who works in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Natural Science. "In this particular energy regime, other ground-based telescopes couldn't look at the sun because they only work at night," she said. "Ours operates 24/7."
[...] "After looking at six years' worth of data, out popped this excess of gamma rays," Nisa said. "When we first saw it, we were like, 'We definitely messed this up. The sun cannot be this bright at these energies.'"
[...] The gamma rays that Nisa and her colleagues observed had about 1 trillion electron volts, or 1 tera electron volt, abbreviated 1 TeV. Not only was this energy level surprising, but so was the fact that they were seeing so much of it.
[...] "This shows that HAWC is adding to our knowledge of our galaxy at the highest energies, and it's opening up questions about our very own sun," Nisa said. "It's making us see things in a different light. Literally."
Journal Reference:
A. Albert et al, Discovery of Gamma Rays from the Quiescent Sun with HAWC, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.051201)
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