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    Cosmic rays tagged posts

    Cosmic rays from a nearby supernova may help explain Earth-like planets

    December 23, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Cosmic rays from a nearby supernova may help explain Earth-like planets
    An illustration of a young solar system immersed in high-energy cosmic rays from a nearby supernova. Unlike considering only direct injection of supernova ejecta, this process naturally explains key radioactive nuclei without destroying the protoplanetary disk. Credit: R. Sawada (AI-assisted illustration)

    How common are Earth-like planets in the universe? When I started working on supernova explosions, I never imagined that my research would eventually lead me to ask a question about the origin of Earth-like planets. Yet that is exactly where it brought me.

    For decades, planetary scientists have believed that the early solar system was enriched with short-lived radioactive elements—such as aluminum-26—by a nearby supernova...

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    Where did cosmic rays come from? Astrophysicists are closer to finding out

    June 10, 2025, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Where did cosmic rays come from? MSU astrophysicists are closer to finding out
    X-ray image of the newly discovered pulsar wind nebular associated with an extreme Galactic cosmic ray source 1LHAASO J0343+5254u, obtained by the XMM-Newton space telescope (DiKerby, Zhang, et al., ApJ, 983, 21). Credit: XMM-Newton space telescope

    New research published by Michigan State University astrophysicists could help scientists answer a century-old question: Where did galactic cosmic rays come from?

    Cosmic rays—high-energy particles moving close to the speed of light—originated from somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy and beyond, but exactly where has been a mystery since they were discovered in 1912. Shuo Zhang, MSU assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and her group led two studies that shed new light on where cosmic rays might have come from...

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    Researchers Capture First Images of a Radio ‘Ring of Fire’ Solar Eclipse

    October 25, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Upper row: Radio images of the 2023 Oct. 14 solar eclipse observed by the Long Wavelength Array at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory Bottom row: Schematic representation of what visible images of the eclipse looked like at the same time Credit: Sijie Yu

    Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Solar-Terrestrial Research (NJIT-CSTR) have captured the Oct. 14 solar eclipse in a way never seen before — recording the first radio images of an annular eclipse’s famous “ring of fire” effect.

    The eclipse was partially visible to much of the continental U.S. for several hours that Saturday, though the full “ring of fire” effect was only visible for less than five minutes, and only for those within its 125-mile-wide path of annularity.

    However, the new observations o...

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    A Neutrino Portrait of our Galaxy reveals High-Energy Particles from within the Milky Way

    July 4, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Five views of the Milky Way: the top two bands show visible light and gamma rays, while the lower three show expected and real neutrino results, plus a measure of the significance of neutrino events detected by IceCube. IceCube Collaboration

    Our Milky Way galaxy is an awe-inspiring feature of the night sky, viewable with the naked eye as a hazy band of stars stretching from horizon to horizon.

    For the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghost-like astronomical messengers.

    In research published June 29 in the journal Science, the IceCube Collaboration—an international group of more than 350 scientists—presents evidence of high-energy neutrino emission coming from the Milky Way.

    We have not...

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