Paris (AFP)
Astronomers have detected, after extremely violent cosmic explosions, radiation at energy levels never before observed, according to studies published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
It all began in July 2018 when Nasa Fermi Gamma-ray and Swift's space telescopes detected a cosmic explosion. Rebelote, in January 2019.
These explosions, which release in a few seconds more energy than our Sun in 10 billion years, give birth to what are called gamma-ray bursts, jets of photons.
Since the discovery of their fortuitous detection, by two US satellites responsible for monitoring the application of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1967, gamma-ray bursts are one of the greatest mysteries of astrophysics .
Immediately after the detections in 2018 and 2019, warnings were issued to astronomers around the world.
Results: in July 2018, the telescopes of the "High Energy Stereoscopic System" in Namibia detect photons with an energy of the order of 0.1 to 0.4 Tev (tera electron volt), ten hours after the initial explosion .
Then in January 2019, particles with even higher energies, between 0.2 and 1 TeV, "is the equivalent of the energy released by the proton collisions in the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator the more powerful on Earth ", are captured by Magic telescopes, located in the Canaries.
"These are by far the most energetic photons ever discovered from a gamma burst," says Elisa Bernardini, one of the leaders of Magic telescopes. Never seen. "A triumph", for Bing Zhang of the University of Nevada in the United States who publishes a commentary with the three studies.
These particles were not detected at the time of the explosion but "a minute later," said AFP Razmik Mirzoyan of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Germany.
"These photons probably were not generated directly by the blast," said Gemma Anderson of Australia's International Center for Radio Astronomy Research, co-author of the work, who points to a clash between the material produced by the explosion and the interstellar medium.
© 2019 AFP