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Showing posts with the label source

Cosmic Buckyballs Could Be Mysterious Infrared Light Source

Scientists may have just traced the source of some of the mysterious infrared emission detected from stars and clouds of interstellar dust and gas. This Unknown Infrared Emission Band (UIE) has baffled scientists for decades; According to a new theoretical work, at least some of these bands could be produced by highly ionized buckminsterfullerene, better known as buckyballs. “I am very honored to have played a part in the extremely complex quantum chemical investigations carried out by Dr Sadjadi that have produced these very exciting results,” said astrophysicist Quentin Parker of the Space Research Laboratory of the University of Hong Kong. “First they looked at the theoretical evidence that Fullerenes – Carbon 60 – can withstand very high ionization rates, and now this work shows the infrared emission signature of the species is a perfect match for some of the most prominent Unknown Infrared Emission features known. This will help re-strengthen this area of ​​research.” Buckminste

Astrophysicists Think They've Found a Mysterious Source of High-Energy Neutrinos

Some of the brightest and most energetic objects in the Universe are the mystery source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, new research has confirmed. A comprehensive analysis has been convincing enough to link the galaxies that host the fiery cores known as blazars with these mysterious particles. It’s a result that provides a completely unexpected solution to a problem that has kept astrophysicists scratching their heads for years. “The results provide, for the first time, irrefutable observational evidence that the PeVatron blazar sub-sample is a source of extragalactic neutrinos and thus an accelerator of cosmic rays,” said astrophysicist Sara Buson of the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany. Neutrinos are the odd little things at the best of times. These subatomic particles are ubiquitous and are among the most abundant in the Universe. However, their mass is almost zero, they are electrically neutral, and they interact very little with anything else in the universe

Researchers aim for the source of the fast radio burst

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Enlarge / An event on the surface of a magnetar can produce a rapid radio explosion. A fast radio burst is exactly what the name suggests: a sudden wave of photons at radio frequencies that often lasts less than a second. After the scientists finished convincing themselves that they saw no equipment interference, a search was carried out for what generated the large amounts of energy involved in fast radio bursts (FRBs). The discovery of the first iterative FRB tells us that the process that generates the FRB does not destroy the object that generated it. Eventually, FRBs were discovered that were associated with events at additional wavelengths, allowing their source to be identified: magnetars, the subset of neutron stars that have the most extreme magnetic fields in the Universe. While that shows excellent progress, it still doesn’t tell us anything about the physics of how the explosion was generated—knowledge that will probably tell us why most magnetars don’t and why they t