Scientists find the highest-energy light ever observed from the sun.
Imagine finding out that our sun, the big glowing ball in the sky we’ve known all our lives, has been hiding a secret.
Scientists have just discovered that the sun gives off an incredibly strong type of light called gamma rays.
And these aren’t just any gamma rays – they’re some of the strongest we’ve ever seen!
Mehr Un Nisa, a smart scientist from Michigan State University, and her team made this discovery. She was really surprised. She said, “We thought we knew the sun, but it keeps surprising us!”
How did they find this out? They used a special observatory called HAWC. It’s not like the telescopes you might picture, which are long tubes that you look through. Instead, HAWC is a big collection of water tanks located high up in Mexico, between two sleeping volcanoes. Why there? Because up high, it can easily see what’s called “air showers.” When the powerful gamma rays from the sun hit our atmosphere, they create these air showers – sort of like invisible fireworks.
These air showers then hit the water in HAWC’s tanks and make a special kind of light that the scientists can detect. With this method, HAWC works day and night, allowing it to constantly study the sun.
Over six years, from 2015 to 2021, the team collected data and found out something shocking. The sun was giving off way more of these strong gamma rays than they thought possible. Nisa said when they first saw the results, they thought they’d made a mistake. The sun was shining way too brightly in these gamma rays!
In simple terms, light has energy. The light we see with our eyes is at a certain energy level. But the gamma rays Nisa found had an energy a trillion times stronger! And there was a lot of it.
Back in the 1990s, scientists guessed that the sun might make these gamma rays when cosmic rays (super-fast particles from space) crash into things inside the sun. But they also thought it would be rare for us to see these gamma rays on Earth.
The first time scientists detected super-strong gamma rays from the sun was in 2011 using a space telescope. They found out that there were many more of these rays than they expected. And there was a hint that even stronger rays existed.
Now, thanks to HAWC and Nisa’s team, we know the sun’s rays can be up to ten times stronger than what was found in 2011. This is a big deal!
But here’s the twist: now that we’ve found these gamma rays, we have a bunch of new questions. How does the sun make them so strong? What role do the sun’s magnetic fields play? It’s like a cosmic mystery, and scientists love a good mystery.
Discoveries like this remind us that space is full of surprises. Even the sun, which feels so familiar to us, has secrets left to uncover. Nisa summed it up perfectly: “This shows us that there’s still so much to learn about our own sun. It’s like we’re seeing it in a whole new light!”
The study was a big group effort. Many institutions from all over the world joined hands for this research, supported by major science organizations. It’s amazing what we can learn when we work together!
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Source: Michigan State University.
