The earliest studies of cosmic rays took place with electroscopes, but scientists later leaned on Geiger-Miller counters and cloud chambers. "Experiments have found that they can be formed in exploding stars (supernovae) or actively accreting supermassive black holes, and that the most energetic cosmic rays come from outside our Milky Way galaxy and have therefore been traveling at such high energies for millions of years before reaching Earth." Since there's no direct way to analyze where they were made, that's the only option to try and uncover their origin – through indirect means. "They are Hydrogen nuclei (protons) and even Helium nuclei that arrive from distant space and create showers of energetic particles in our atmosphere," explained Professor Gawiser.Īs such, scientists spend time studying cosmic rays to figure out what they're composed of to get to the bottom of where they originated from. They typically originate from our sun and even galaxies outside of our solar system. They're high-energy protons and nuclei that move through space at the speed of light. Cosmic RaysĬosmic rays are an intriguing phenomenon. A single drop of neutron star material has more mass than a skyscraper."Īccording to NASA, the matter inside a neutron star gets packed so tightly, a simple sugar cube-sized amount would weigh " more than 1 billion tons, about the same as Mount Everest." Yikes. "The neutron stars that result are amazingly dense, packing roughly the mass of our Sun, which is a million times bigger than Earth in volume, into the size of a small city. "The compression of the core of the star during the explosion causes protons and electrons to combine into neutrons, which effectively form a single giant atomic nucleus," Gawiser explained of the massive compression. Neutron stars can pack about 1.3 to 2.5 times the mass of our sun into a sphere that's about 12 miles in diameter. "If the core of the star that’s left behind is more than about twice the mass of our Sun, it forms a black hole otherwise, we get a neutron star." "Like the 'run-of-the-mill' black holes, neutron stars are formed when massive stars explode," Professor Gawiser told Mic. What happens when a star explodes? You might very well get what's called a neutron star. There are still plenty of unknown factors when it comes to black holes, but one thing is certain: they’re massive, capable of doing serious damage to objects in space around them, and they’re not appropriate for humans (or any beings) to ever approach. "We don’t yet know how supermassive black holes form - were there ‘seeds’ from the direct collapse of clouds of gas and dark matter in the early universe? Or perhaps the first generation of stars was much more massive than present-day stars and left behind 100-solar-mass (or larger) black holes? The discovery of gravitational waves by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) revealed that there are a lot of 20-30 solar mass black holes in our universe." "We have a good idea how 'run-of-the-mill' black holes form - during explosions of massive stars called supernovae," Professor Eric Gawiser of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University told Mic. However, scientists still aren't completely sure how those come into being just yet. The largest black holes thought to exist, of which there is one believed to be at the center of our Milky Way, are known as supermassive black holes. Researchers must utilize special telescopes and other instruments to locate them in space, despite the fact that they're capable of absolutely massive sizes. Black holes are thought to be the result of matter being squeezed into a space too tiny for it to reasonably occupy, which can occur as aresult of a star's death.īecause light is incapable of escaping black holes they're invisible to the human eye. In a nutshell, a black hole is the result of gravity pulling so hard in a certain area in space that even light has no chance of escaping. But their familiarity doesn't mean much when they're still very much behemoths that we just don't know a lot about. You’ve likely heard of black holes before, as one of the more common space phenomena that scientists discuss.
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