The search for a powerful natural particle accelerator

Earth is almost constantly beset by a stream of particles from space called cosmic rays. These particles consist of protons, bundles of two protons and two neutrons each (alpha particles), a small number of heavier atomic nuclei and a smaller fraction of anti-electrons and anti-protons. Cosmic rays often have high energy – typically up to half of 1 GeV. One GeV is almost the amount of energy that a single proton has at rest. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) itself can accelerate protons up to 7,000 GeV.

But this doesn’t mean cosmic rays are feeble: historically, some detectors have recorded high-energy and very-high-energy cosmic rays. The most energetic cosmic ray – dubbed the “oh my god” particle – was a proton recorded over Utah in 1991 with an energy of around 3 x 10¹² GeV, which is around three-billion-times higher than the energy to which the LHC can accelerate protons today. This proton was travelling at 99.9% the speed of light in vacuum. This is a phenomenal amount of energy – about as much kinetic energy as a baseball moving at 95 km/hr but concentrated into the volume of a proton, which has 10⁴²-times less space in which to hold that energy.

Detectors have also spotted some cosmic-ray events with energies exceeding 1,000,000 GeV – or 1 PeV. They’re uncommon compared to all cosmic-ray events but relatively more common than the likes of the “oh my god” particle. Physicists are interested in them because they indicate the presence of a natural particle accelerator somewhere in the universe that’s injecting protons with ginormous amounts of energy and sending them blasting off into space. One term for such natural accelerators seemingly capable of accelerating protons to 0.1-1 PeV is ‘PeVatron’. And the question is: where can we find a PeVatron?

There are three broad sources of cosmic rays: from the Sun, from somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy and from somewhere beyond the galaxy. Most of the cosmic rays we have detected have been from the latter two sources. In fact, there’s a curious feature called the ‘knee’ that physicists believe could distinguish between these sources. If you plot the number of cosmic rays on the y-axis and the energies of the cosmic rays on the x-axis, you’ll find yourself looking at the famous Swordy plot:

As you can see, the plot shows a peculiar bump, an almost imperceptible change in slope, when transitioning from the blue to the pink zones – this is the ‘knee’. Physicists have interpreted the cosmic rays above the knee to be from within the Milky Way and those below to be from outside the galaxy, although why this is so isn’t clear.

Before cosmic rays interact with other particles in their way, they’re called primary cosmic rays. After their interaction, such as the atoms and molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere, they produce a shower of secondary particles; these are the secondary cosmic rays. Physicists can get a tighter fit on the potential source of primary cosmic rays by analysing the direction at which they strike the atmosphere, the composition of the secondary cosmic rays, and the energies of both the primary and the secondary rays. This is why we suspect supernovae are one source of within-the-galaxy cosmic rays, with some possible mechanisms of action.

One, for example, is shockfront acceleration: a proton could get trapped between two shockwaves from the same supernova. As the outer wave slows and the inner wave charges in, the proton could bounce rapidly between the two shockfronts and emerge greatly energised out of a gap. However, we don’t know what fraction of cosmic rays, at different energies, supernovae can account for.

Potential extragalactic sources include active galactic nuclei – the centres of galaxies, including the neighbourhood of supermassive black holes – and the extremely powerful gamma-ray bursts. Physicists have associated them with cataclysmic events like neutron-star mergers and the formative events of black-holes.

However, exercises to triangulate the sources of high-energy cosmic rays are complicated by galactic magnetic fields (which curve the paths of charged particles). A proton accelerated by the shockfront mechanism could also bump into some other particle as it emerges, producing a flash of gamma rays that physicists can look for – but only if they have a way to isolate it from other sources of gamma rays in a supernova’s vicinity. This is difficult work.

Researchers from the US recently analysed gamma-ray data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (FGST), in low-Earth orbit, of the supernova remnant G106.3+2.7. Astrophysicists have suspected that this object could be a PeVatron for more than a decade, and the US research team used FGST data to check if they the suspicion could be true. The difficult bit? The data spanned 12 years.

In 2008, physicists recorded very high energy (100-100,000 GeV) gamma rays from G106.3+2.7, located around 800 parsec (2,600 lightyears) away. The US research team figured that they could have been produced in two ways. Let’s call them Mechanism A and Mechanism B. Physicists already know Mechanism A is associated with cosmic rays while Mechanism B is not. The US team members used 12 years of data to characterise gamma-ray, X-ray and radio emissions around the remnant so they could determine which mechanism could have been responsible for all of them the way they have been observed, with the gamma rays as secondary cosmic rays.

The team’s analysis found that the theory of Mechanism A almost exactly accounted for the energies of the gamma rays from the remnant while also accommodating the other radiation – whereas the theory of Mechanism B couldn’t explain the gamma rays and the remnant’s X-ray emissions together. In effect, the team had a way to justify the idea that G106.3+2.7 could be a PeVatron.

Mechanism B is inverse Compton scattering by relativistic electrons. Inverse Compton scattering is when high-energy electrons collide with low-energy photons and the photons gain energy (in regular Compton scattering, the electrons gain energy). When this model couldn’t account for the gamma-ray emissions, the team invoked a modified version involving two sets of electrons, with each set accelerated to different energies by different mechanisms. But the team found that the FGST data continued to disfavour the involvement of leptons, and instead preferred the involvement of hadrons. Leptons – like electrons – are particles that don’t interact with other particles through the strong nuclear force. Hadrons, on the other hand, do, and they were implicated in Mechanism A: the decay of neutral pions.

Pions are the lightest known hadrons and come in three types: π⁺, π⁰ and π^–. Neutral pions are π⁰. They have a very short lifetime, around 85 attoseconds – that’s 0.000000000000000085 seconds. And when they decay, they decay into gamma rays, i.e. high-energy photons.

Some 380,000 years after the Big Bang, a series of events in the universe left behind some radiation that survives to this day. This relic radiation is called the cosmic microwave background, a sea of photons in the microwave frequency pervading the cosmos. When a cosmic-ray proton collides with one of these photons, a delta-plus baryon is formed that then decays into a proton and a neutral pion. The neutral pion then decays to gamma rays, which are detectable as secondary cosmic rays.

Knowing the energy of the gamma rays allows physicists to work back to the energy of the cosmic ray. And according to the team’s calculations, the 2009 gamma-ray emission indicates G106.3+2.7 could be a PeVatron. As the team’s preprint paper concluded,

“… only a handful, out of hundreds of radio-emitting supernova remnants, have been observed to emit very high energy radiation with a hard spectrum. The scarcity of PeVatron candidates and the rareness of remnants with very high energy emission make … G106.3+2.7 a unique source. Our study provides strong evidence for proton acceleration in this nearby remnant, and by extension, supports a potential role for G106.3+2.7-like supernova remnants in meeting the challenge of accounting for the observed cosmic-ray knee using galactic sources”.

Featured image: An artist’s impression of supernova 1993J. Credit: NASA, ESA and G. Bacon (STScI).