[imagesource:Osaka Metropolitan University/L-INSIGHT,
Kyoto University/Ryuunosuke Takeshige]

A beam of cosmic energy so powerful that it carried the equivalent of hundreds of billions of volts of electricity hit Earth in 2021.

Still today, scientists are baffled by this mysterious stream of energy with no idea what it could be or where it possibly could have come from.

A facility in Utah dedicated to detecting sources of cosmic energy that exceed 1 exa-electron volt (EeV) – a unit of measurement equivalent to 1 billion volts of electricity – detected the powerful ray on May 21, 2021. It was measured at 244 EeVs, making it the most powerful blast of cosmic energy detected since 1991, noted the Messenger.

So its brute strength was out of this world, scientists couldn’t tell what particles it was made of, and they had no idea what might have unleashed it.

But you know, mystery is the backbone of science.

An international team of physicists published a new paper on Thursday in the journal Science, claiming that they believe the beam was mostly composed of protons, a small particle that is a vital building block of atoms.

The analysis of this revelation is where it gets stranger:

When any kind of beam — whether it is light, energy, radiation or something else — travels through space, it encounters all kinds of objects along the way. Even if the beam doesn’t hit the objects directly, they can still divert the ray’s path. An easier way to think about this is if you have pieces of wood in a stream — some of the water will flow around the wood, some will flow through the wood and some will be absorbed by it. The same is essentially true in space, except the objects are stars, galaxies and other cosmic features.

Researchers believe this incredible blast was so powerful – so much that a single particle in the beam has the same energy to a brick dropped on your foot from waist height –  that it couldn’t have been significantly altered along the way, making it easier to trace its origin.

“The particles are so high energy, they shouldn’t be affected by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields. You should be able to point to where they come from in the sky,” said Utah University professor John Matthews, a co-author of the study, in a statement.

“But… you trace its trajectory to its source and there’s nothing high energy enough to have produced it. That’s the mystery of this — what the heck is going on?”

The researchers tried to do just that and they found nothing. AKA  the likely origin points are marked within seemingly empty points in space, with not a single known galaxy nearby.

This area of the universe located close to the Milky Way is so well known for its lack of features that it even has a name: the Local Void.

How then, can a giant beam of impressive energy come from a void in space? Some questions just lead to more questions.

Anyway, the researchers are trying their hand at a few possible explanations. For one, there could be some yet-to-be-discovered astronomical body in the Void after all. Or perhaps galaxies have stronger magnetic fields than they thought, meaning the beam came from somewhere entirely different.

Or possibly, and far more worrying, we could just have “an incomplete understanding of particle physics”.

[source:messenger]