(credit: HESS telescope)
We're rightly proud of the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates protons up to 7 Tera-electron Volts before smashing them together. But the Milky Way regularly hurls protons towards Earth that have energies a thousand times higher than that, in the Peta-electron Volt (PeV) range. Astrophysicists refer to the mysterious sources of PeV particles as “PeVatrons."
What can possibly be boosting particles to these levels? A new paper figures out how many of the high-energy protons are being produced and finds one plausible source: the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center.
Rather than looking for high-energy protons, the authors track them indirectly. Depending on their interactions with the environment, the accelerated protons can produce gamma rays, which are high-energy photons. The energy of these photons are related to the energy of the initial particles.
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