Space and astronomy news
In October 2022, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected an extraordinarily powerful Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). It still stands as the Brightest Of All Time (BOAT), and astronomers have been curious about it ever since.
New research has uncovered more details in the burst. What do they tell us about these forceful explosions?
Continue reading “Astronomers Uncover New Details in the Brightest Gamma Ray Burst Ever Detected”
Why is there so much antimatter in the Universe? Ordinary matter is far more plentiful than antimatter, but scientists keep detecting more and more antimatter in the form of positrons. More positrons reach Earth than standard models predict. Where do they come from?
Scientists think pulsars are one source, and a new study strengthens that idea.
Continue reading “A Pulsar is Blasting out Jets of Matter and Antimatter”
When pulsars were first discovered in 1967, their rhythmic radio-wave pulsations were a mystery. Some thought their radio beams must be of extraterrestrial origin.
We’ve learned a lot since then. We know that pulsars are magnetized, rotating neutrons stars. We know that they rotate very rapidly, with their magnetic poles sending sweeping beams of radio waves out into space. And if they’re aimed the right way, we can “see” them as pulses of radio waves, even though the radio waves are steady. They’re kind of like lighthouses.
But the exact mechanism that creates all of that electromagnetic radiation has remained a mystery.
Continue reading “Why Pulsars Are So Bright”
Astronomers have been watching a nearby pulsar with a strange halo around it. That pulsar might answer a question that’s puzzled astronomers for some time. The pulsar is named Geminga, and it’s one of the nearest pulsars to Earth, about 800 light years away in the constellation Gemini. Not only is it close to Earth, but Geminga is also very bright in gamma rays.
Continue reading “Halo Around a Pulsar could Explain Why We See Antimatter Coming from Space”
In 1924, French physicist Louis de Broglie proposed that photons – the subatomic particle that constitutes light – behave as both a particle and a wave. Known as “particle-wave duality”, this property has been tested and shown to apply with other subatomic particles (electrons and neutrons) as well as larger, more complex molecules.
Recently, an experiment conducted by researchers with the QUantum Interferometry and Gravitation with Positrons and LAsers (QUPLAS) collaboration demonstrated that this same property applies to antimatter. This was done using the same kind of interference test (aka. double-slit experiment) that helped scientists to propose particle-wave duality in the first place.
Continue reading “Antimatter Behaves Exactly the Same as Regular Matter in Double Slit Experiments”
Lighting has always been a source of awe and mystery for us lowly mortals. In ancient times, people associated it with Gods like Zeus and Thor, the fathers of the Greek and Norse pantheons. With the birth of modern science and meteorology, lighting is no longer considered the province of the divine. However, this does not mean that the sense of mystery it carries has diminished one bit.
For example, scientists have found that lightning occurs in the atmospheres of other planets, like the gas giant Jupiter (appropriately!) and the hellish world of Venus. And according to a recent study from Kyoto University, gamma rays caused by lighting interact with air molecules, regularly producing radioisotopes and even positrons – the antimatter version of electrons.
The study, titled “Photonuclear Reactions Triggered by Lightning Discharge“, recently appeared in the scientific journal Nature. The study was led by Teruaki Enoto, a researcher from The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research at Kyoto University, and included members from the University of Tokyo, Hokkaido University, Nagoya University, the RIKEN Nishina Center, the MAXI Team, and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency.
For some time, physicists have been aware that small bursts of high-energy gamma rays can be produced by lightning storms – what are known as “terrestrial gamma-ray flashes”. They are believed to be the result of static electrical fields accelerating electrons, which are then slowed by the atmosphere. This phenomenon was first discovered by space-based observatories, and rays of up to 100,000 electron volts (100 MeV) have been observed.
Given the energy levels involved, the Japanese research team sought to examine how these bursts of gamma rays interact with air molecules. As Teruaki Enoto from Kyoto University, who leads the project, explained in a Kyoto University press release:
“We already knew that thunderclouds and lightning emit gamma rays, and hypothesized that they would react in some way with the nuclei of environmental elements in the atmosphere. In winter, Japan’s western coastal area is ideal for observing powerful lightning and thunderstorms. So, in 2015 we started building a series of small gamma-ray detectors, and placed them in various locations along the coast.”
Unfortunately, the team ran into funding problems along the way. As Enoto explained, they decided to reach out to the general public and established a crowdfunding campaign to fund their work. “We set up a crowdfunding campaign through the ‘academist’ site,” he said, “in which we explained our scientific method and aims for the project. Thanks to everybody’s support, we were able to make far more than our original funding goal.”
Thanks to the success of their campaign, the team built and installed particle detectors across the northwest coast of Honshu. In February of 2017, they installed four more detectors in Kashiwazaki city, which is a few hundred meters away from the neighboring town of Niigata. Immediately after the detectors were installed, a lightning strike took place in Niigata, and the team was able to study it.
What they found was something entirely new and unexpected. After analyzing the data, the team detected three distinct gamma-ray bursts of varying duration. The first was less than a millisecond long, the second was gamma ray-afterglow that took several milliseconds to decay, and the last was a prolonged emission lasting about one minute. As Enoto explained:
“We could tell that the first burst was from the lightning strike. Through our analysis and calculations, we eventually determined the origins of the second and third emissions as well.”
They determined that the second afterglow was caused by the lightning reacting with nitrogen in the atmosphere. Essentially, gamma rays are capable of causing nitrogen molecules to lose a neutron, and it was the reabsorption of these neutrons by other atmospheric particles that produced the gamma-ray afterglow. The final, prolonged emission was the result of unstable nitrogen atoms breaking down.
It was here that things really got interesting. As the unstable nitrogen broke down, it released positrons that then collided with electrons, causing matter-antimatter annihilations that released more gamma rays. As Enoto explained, this demonstrated, for the first time that antimatter is something that can occur in nature due to common mechanisms.
“We have this idea that antimatter is something that only exists in science fiction,” he said. “Who knew that it could be passing right above our heads on a stormy day? And we know all this thanks to our supporters who joined us through ‘academist’. We are truly grateful to all.”
If these results are indeed correct, than antimatter is not the extremely rare substance that we tend to think it is. In addition, the study could present new opportunities for high-energy physics and antimatter research. All of this research could also lead to the development of new or refined techniques for creating it.
Looking ahead, Enoto and his team hopes to conduct more research using the ten detectors they still have operating along the coast of Japan. They also hope to continue involving the public with their research, a process that goes far beyond crowdfunding and includes the efforts of citizen scientists to help process and interpret data.
Further Reading: University of Kyoto, Nature, NASA Goddard Media Studios
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A couple of years ago, the Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics, PAMELA, sent us back some curious information… an overload of anti-matter in the Milky Way. Why does this member of the cosmic ray spectrum have interesting implications to the scientific community? It could mean the proof needed to confirm the existence of dark matter.
By employing the Fermi Large Area Telescope, researchers with the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University were able to verify the results of PAMELA’s findings. What’s more, by being in the high energy end of the spectrum, these abundances seem to verify current thinking on dark matter behavior and how it might produce positrons.
“There are various theories, but the basic idea is that if a dark matter particle were to meet its anti-particle, both would be annihilated. And that process of annihilation would generate new particles, including positrons.” says Stephan Funk, an assistant professor at Stanford and member of KIPAC. “When the PAMELA experiment looked at the spectrum of positrons, which means sampling positrons across a range of energy levels, it found more than would be expected from already understood astrophysics processes. The reason PAMELA generated such excitement is that it’s at least possible the excess positrons are coming from annihilation of dark matter particles.”
But there has been a glitch in what might have been a smooth solution. Current thinking has the positron signal dropping off when it reaches a specific level – a finding which wasn’t verified and led the researchers to feel the results were inconclusive. But the research just didn’t end there. The team consisting of Funk, Justin Vandenbroucke, a postdoc and Kavli Fellow and avli-supported graduate student Warit Mitthumsiri, came up with some creative solutions. While the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can’t distinguish between negatively charged electrons and positively charged positrons without a magnet – the group came up with their needs just a few hundred miles away.
Earth’s own magnetic field…
“The thing that was most fun about this analysis for me is its interdisciplinary nature. We absolutely could not have made the measurement without this detailed map of the Earth’s magnetic field, which was provided by an international team of geophysicists. So to make this measurement, we had to understand the Earth’s magnetic field, which meant poring over work published for entirely different reasons by scientists in another discipline altogether.” said Vandenbroucke. “The big takeaway here is how valuable it is to measure and understand the world around us in as many ways as possible. Once you have this basic scientific knowledge, it’s often surprising how that knowledge can be useful.”
Oddly enough, they still came up with more than the expected amount of antimatter positrons as previously reported in Nature. But again, the findings didn’t show the theoretical drop-off that was to be expected if dark matter were involved. Despite these inconclusive results, it’s still a unique way of looking at difficult studies and making the most of what’s at hand.
“I find it to be fascinating to try to get the most out of an astrophysical instrument and I think we did that with this measurement. It was very satisfying that our approach, novel as it was, seemed to work so well. Also, you really have to go where the science takes you.” says Funk. “Our motivation was to confirm the PAMELA results because they are so exciting and unexpected. And as far as understanding what the Universe is actually trying to tell us here, I think it was important that PAMELA results were confirmed by a completely different instrument and technique.”
Original Story Source: Kavli Foundation News Release. For Further Reading: Measurement of separate cosmic-ray electron and positron spectra with the Fermi Large Area Telescope.