The third type of cosmic ray is the charged particles. These are the particles that make up your atmosphere and the Earths magnetosphere. The second type of cosmic ray is the neutral particles. These particles are about ten times more powerful than a normal gamma ray. These are the particles that are produced in the most powerful star colliders.
These are the particles that cause the most damage to your eyeball. The galactic cosmic rays that hit your eyeball are extremely high-energy particles (gamma rays), and they usually originate from a star that’s relatively close to Earth. They are also the source of the most intense gamma rays ever detected, and these are what cause the most damage to your eyeballs. When a blast goes off, it illuminates that particular region of space enabling astronomers to get a glimpse back in time to the birth of the very first stars 500 million-or-so years after the Universe came into existence.Today’s news at 9.30 am: galactic cosmic rays, as the name suggests, are all about cosmic rays.Ĭosmic rays are an important component of the atmosphere and the Earth’s magnetosphere. “It certainly gives us a clue where gold comes from.”īecause light from the other side of the Universe takes so long to reach the Earth, some gamma rays bursts spotted by Swift actually began their journey towards us shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. “There was a burst that had an unusual afterglow that told us that a lot of heavy elements like gold had been produced,” Gehrels says. The explosions that result in gamma ray bursts might even have provided all the gold in the Universe. “When a gamma ray burst goes off near a star with a planetary system, it can have a very important and destructive influence,” says Gehrels. What the Swift scientists have also discovered is that gamma ray bursts are vitally important to the evolution of the Universe. Which helps explain why the resulting explosion is so phenomenal. These cosmic bodies are just a few kilometres across but have a similar mass to the Sun. The Swift team has concluded that these are caused by the collision of two dense neutron stars. The second type of these explosions (anything shorter than two seconds) is categorised as short bursts. When the stars subsequently explode into oblivion, a jet of gamma rays is blasted out across space. Now astronomers are fairly certain that the longer bursts – that is anything over two seconds – are caused when the centre of massive stars collapse in on themselves forming black holes. “As more time went on, she’d just sleep right through it.”īefore Swift was launched, no one knew for sure what caused gamma ray bursts. “My wife was amused by this at the beginning, pretty soon it got to be annoying,” says Gehrels. However, not everyone agrees with this assessment. “It’s really exciting, you’re making discoveries and learning something new at all hours of the day and night.” Like being a doctor on call, duty scientists working on Swift even get woken up in the middle of the night to react to an event on the other side of the cosmos. Within 15 minutes of the burst, they will have issued an alert so that other observatories on the ground can point their telescopes towards the source. “Immediately – even if we’re on the road somewhere – we’ll go to our laptops, log in and then get on the phone to teleconference with other members of the team,” says Gehrels. Meanwhile back on Earth, within a few seconds of the blast going off, the science team are notified by text message. In orbit since November 2004, the spacecraft is named after its ability to respond instantly to any of the 90 or so high-energy flashes of radiation it detects each year.Īs soon as Swift detects a gamma ray burst somewhere in its field of view, the satellite rotates to point its X-ray and optical telescopes in that direction. Gehrels leads the international team of scientists – with members in the US, UK and Italy – operating the Swift satellite, which they use to study the behaviour and origins of these cosmic events. “It’s certainly not as great a threat as a giant asteroid hitting our planet.” Still, it probably pays to keep an eye on them. “The chances of that happening to the Earth is fairly small, about once in a billion years,” he adds. If it was just 100 light years away it could blow the atmosphere off,” says Gehrels matter-of-factly. “For a planet 1000 light years away, it would destroy the ozone layer.
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