Friday, April 01, 2005
Pie in The Sky
Astronomers probing the Milky Way with an X-ray satellite telescope have found a gigantic "natural" particle accelerator suspended like a halo above the Arches cluster, the largest star forming region in our galaxy.
Resembling a huge hula hoop, the accelerator has a circumference of some 60 light years. Particles racing on this cosmic autobahn achieve velocities near the speed of light and energies thousand times higher than its earthly counterparts in Brookhaven, Fermilab, or CERN.
Masaaki Sakano from the University of Leicester, U.K. said that most X-ray emissions in the universe are the residual radiation of some cataclysmic event like supernova explosion and have a characteristic temperature. "However, in this case the loop is non-thermal and this means that whatever the origin of the structure is, it is not stationary but rather the result of some ongoing process," Sakano said.
The scientists said that they weren't sure whether the structure was "physically related to the Arches cluster or just happens to be in our line of sight."
The cluster made a splash last month when astronomers studying Arches stars with the Hubble Space Telescopes found that stars have a weight limit: they can't get any fatter than 150 solar masses. (See The Skinny on Fat Stars.)
Resembling a huge hula hoop, the accelerator has a circumference of some 60 light years. Particles racing on this cosmic autobahn achieve velocities near the speed of light and energies thousand times higher than its earthly counterparts in Brookhaven, Fermilab, or CERN.
Masaaki Sakano from the University of Leicester, U.K. said that most X-ray emissions in the universe are the residual radiation of some cataclysmic event like supernova explosion and have a characteristic temperature. "However, in this case the loop is non-thermal and this means that whatever the origin of the structure is, it is not stationary but rather the result of some ongoing process," Sakano said.
The scientists said that they weren't sure whether the structure was "physically related to the Arches cluster or just happens to be in our line of sight."
The cluster made a splash last month when astronomers studying Arches stars with the Hubble Space Telescopes found that stars have a weight limit: they can't get any fatter than 150 solar masses. (See The Skinny on Fat Stars.)
