[Representation]
Michigan: In a record-breaking discovery, scientists have found the Sun radiating an extraoridnary amount of gamma rays, the highest-energy radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The finding marks the first time such high-energy radiation has been detected coming from the Sun.
Gamma rays have the smallest wavelengths and the most energy of any wave in the electromagnetic spectrum.
The gamma rays emitted by the Sun were measured at around 1 trillion electron volts, making it the brightest source of this type of radiation ever recorded.
The phenomenon was discovered by the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), a facility designed to observe high-energy particles associated with gamma rays and cosmic rays.
“The Sun is more surprising than we knew,” Mehr un Nisa, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Michigan State University (MSU), who along with other MSU Physicists was part of an international collaboration that has discovered the highest-energy light coming from the Sun, said.
“We thought we had this star figured out, but that’s not the case", she added.
Although the high-energy light doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface, these gamma rays create telltale signatures that were detected by Mehr un Nisa and her colleagues working with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC, the university said in a report.
"When we first saw it, we were like, 'We definitely messed this up. The sun cannot be this bright at these energies'", Mehrun Nisa said.
Upon deliberation, however, the team realized that such brightness definitely existed — and it was simply due to the sheer amount of gamma rays the Sun seemed to be spitting out.
The findings published in the journal Physical Review Letters, have implications for Solar Physics and could provide insights into the inner workings of our host star.
The research team behind this discovery believes that there may be even higher-energy gamma rays emitted by the sun that have yet to be detected.
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