High-energy cosmic rays may form during black hole birth
https://www.earth.com/news/high-energy-cosmic-rays-could-arise-from-the-magnetic-chaos-during-black-hole-formation/
High-energy cosmic rays may form during black hole birth
https://www.earth.com/news/high-energy-cosmic-rays-could-arise-from-the-magnetic-chaos-during-black-hole-formation/
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“A new study suggests that those monsters are born in the churning magnetic fields of pairs of neutron stars that are on the brink of collapse. The high-energy rays are thought to arise moments before a black hole flickers into existence.”
This is obviously a publicity stunt for the new Fantastic Four movie.
>Astrophysicists once blamed […] **gamma‑ray bursts** […] for such energies. Yet decades of sky maps reveal no tidy link between those explosions and the arrival directions of UHECRs.
They say this and then go on to explain how these may be linked to binary neutron star mergers. Which are… (short) gamma-ray bursts. They even reference the most famous SGRB event, the joint GW/SGRB 170817.
The actual paper gets it right, obviously, by identifying that long gamma-ray bursts are likely not the sources are, which are a different class of GRB. But identifying that short gamma ray bursts are linked, because quite literally, they are binary neutron star mergers. Pretty shoddy work from the author of this article
Astronomer here! I actually did my MSc thesis on cosmic ray detection before I switched to radio astronomy. Specifically one of the weirder mysteries out there is the origin of [Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray), which is where you have an atomic nucleus from space that’s traveling at nearly the speed of light and has the energy of a baseball being flung by a major league pitcher. In one tiny particle! Problem is they’re rare- like one a square kilometer a century rare- and the magnetic fields of the galaxy scramble them a bit so you can’t just trace their line straight back to find their origin.
So there’s a lot of theories out there on what causes them and looks like this is yet another theory. I’m not sure from looking into this if it’s testable or not though.