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Tiny cosmic particles can have serious impacts on Earth, causing election votes to be miscounted, planes to free-fall and computers to reboot, scientists say.These cosmic particles can hit electronic devices on Earth, which can cause components to burn out and cause malfunctions. Cosmic particles come from cosmic rays from outside our solar system. They crash into the Earth's atmosphere creating a range of particles, including protons, electrons, X-rays and gamma-rays that can penetrate aircraft.These cosmic particles constantly hit Earth, and can cause bits of information in electronics to change.

Artist’s impression of GRB 211211A. Scientists have linked this unusual gamma-ray burst from a nearby galaxy to a neutron star merger. Credit: Soheb Mandhai @TheAstroPhoenix An unusually powerful gamma-ray burst (GRB 211211A), detected from a nearby galaxy, has been linked to a neutron star merger by an international team of scientists. This burst, notable for its excess of infrared light, was shown to originate from a kilonova, an event thought to occur when neutron stars collide. Scientists have linked a highly unusual blast of high-energy light from a nearby galaxy to a neutron star merger. The event, detected in December...

Astrophysicists reveal the sun is beaming down gamma rays with energies higher than ever measured. The gamma rays lose energy in Earth’s atmosphere, meaning they don’t present a concern to life. This also allows them to be discovered by researchers working with the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC, located in Mexico. “This shows that HAWC is adding to our knowledge of our galaxy at the highest energies, and it’s opening up questions about our very own sun,” said Mehr Un Nisa, a postdoctoral researcher with MSU and the corresponding author of the new report. Sometimes, the best place to...

An orbiting star begins to eclipse its partner, a rapidly rotating, superdense stellar remnant called a pulsar. Image courtesy of Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA *************************************************************************** Jan. 26 (UPI) -- NASA made a first-of-its-kind discovery with its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, spotting the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of star system. The agency shared the news with Nature Astronomy on Thursday after scientists researched a decade of observations from the telescope that can detect the most astonishing celestial events from gamma bursts to black holes. Gamma-ray eclipses were observed from a special binary star system that is orbited by...

Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings. The leading theory among scientists is that Miyake events are solar flares that are 80 times more powerful than the strongest flare ever recorded. But a new study...suggests that the origin of the radiation bursts could be even more mysterious than first thought. Scientists have spotted six Miyake events in tree rings so far, indicated by sudden, single-year leaps in the concentrations...

Simulation of a supermassive black hole. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; ESA/Gaia/DPAC) _____________________________________________________________________________________ The most energetic light and particles in the Universe represent an enduring mystery: we don't know where they come from. Sure, we can trace some; but there's more gamma radiation and neutrinos streaming through the Universe than we can account for. A lot more. And astronomers have just found an explanation for some of them: nearly dormant black holes. This, they say, can explain the excess of 'soft' gamma rays in the Universe without relying on cold (nonthermal) electrons – which has always been a problematic explanation,...

NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU) ===================================================================== Supernovas may have affected the Earth’s climate in the last 40,000 years. Tree-ring data suggests supernovas caused spikes in radiocarbon. Could the next nearby supernova cause a collapse of civilization? ====================================================================== Dendrochronology is a fancy word for tree-ring dating, where the age of a tree can be determined by the number of growth rings across its trunk. But there’s a lot more to learn from looking at a tree’s rings than simply its age. Like fingerprints, tree rings give scientists clues to what the world was like when a tree was alive....

For more than two decades, astronomers have been systematically tracing mystery sources of high-energy gamma rays to their sources. One, however, remained stubborn - the brightest unidentified source of gamma rays in the Milky Way. It seemed to be coming from a binary system 2,740 light-years away, but only one of the stars could be found. Now, astronomers have solved the mystery and pinned down that second star by searching gamma-ray data obtained between 2008 and 2018. Together, the two stars constitute one of the weirdest binary systems we've ever seen. "The binary star system and the neutron star at...

A brief but extremely powerful cosmic blast from a distance galaxy has taken the record for the brightest light ever seen from Earth. It was emitted by a gamma ray burst seven billion light-years away and created more energy in a few seconds than the sun will burn in its 10 billion year lifetime. The discovery, led by researchers from Curtin University in Western Australia involved more than 300 scientists from around the world. Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic events in the universe - the most massive since the Big Bang, says co author of the study, Dr Gemma...

[T]he study of GRBs have been complicated by two major issues. On the one hand, GRBs are very short lived, lasting for only seconds at a time. Second, all detected events have occurred in distant galaxies, some of which were billions of light-years away. Nevertheless, there are a few theories as to what could account for them, ranging from the formation of black holes and collisions between neutron stars to extra-terrestrial communications. ... With the assistance of their collaborators in the US, France, the UK and Sweden, the team from Queen’s University Belfast relied on the Gemini laser, located at...

Explanation: If you could only see gamma-rays, photons with up to a billion or more times the energy of visible light, the Moon would be brighter than the Sun! That startling notion underlies this novel image of the Moon, based on data collected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's Large Area Telescope (LAT) instrument during its first seven years of operation (2008-2015). Fermi's gamma-ray vision doesn't distinguish details on the lunar surface, but a gamma-ray glow consistent with the Moon's size and position is clearly found at the center of the false color map. The brightest pixels correspond to the...

Bursts of gamma rays from the center of our galaxy are not likely to be signals of dark matter but rather other astrophysical phenomena such as fast-rotating stars called millisecond pulsars, according to two new studies, one from a team based at Princeton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another based in the Netherlands. Previous studies suggested that gamma rays coming from the dense region of space in the inner Milky Way galaxy could be caused when invisible dark matter particles collide. But using new statistical analysis methods, the two research teams independently found that the gamma ray...

Explanation: If gamma-rays were raindrops a flare from a supermassive black hole might look like this. Not so gently falling on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope from June 14 to June 16 the gamma-ray photons, with energies up to 50 billion electron volts, originated in active galaxy 3C 279 some 5 billion light-years away. Each gamma-ray "drop" is an expanding circle in the timelapse visualization, the color and maximum size determined by the gamma-ray's measured energy. Starting with a background drizzle, the sudden downpour that then trails off is the intense, high energy flare. The creative and calming presentation of...

The duo suggests that alien-like ships traveling at relativistic speeds can easily intermingle with photons in the cosmic microwave background, which is dubbed CMB. This means that a spacecraft traveling at near light speed would leave a unique signature, and this means it would therefore be fully discoverable. Their research, which was just published in this month's MIT Technology Review, points out that the interaction with photons in the CMB “should create a drag that imposes specific limits on how fast spacecraft can travel.” And, “it should also produce a unique signature of relativistic spaceflight that ought to be visible...

An artist’s impression of the stars creating gamma-ray bursts. The background blue star is the progenitor of a standard long duration gamma-ray burst. A new type of powerful, long-lasting explosion deep in space may be the death knell of gigantic stars, scientists say. Star explosions (called supernovas) can give off high-powered flashes of radiation known as gamma-ray bursts. These bursts usually fall into two categories: ones that last less than two seconds, and ones that last for several minutes. But this new type of explosion can create a gamma-ray burst that goes on for much longer — up to several...

Few people doubt there is intelligent alien life in the Milky Way galaxy, but where can we expect to find it? Astronomers think that the inner sector of the Milky Way Galaxy may be the most likely to support habitable worlds. Unfortunately some of these places are also most dangerous to all life-forms. According to Michael Gowanlock of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, and his Trent University colleagues David Patton and Sabine McConnel, habitability in the Milky Way can be based on three factors: supernova rates, metallicity (the abundance of heavy elements, used as a proxy for planet formation) and the time...

Martin Bizzarro of the University of Copenhagen and his colleagues set out to determine the amount of iron in the early solar system. To do so, they measured nickel-60, a decay product of iron-60, in eight meteorites known to have formed at different times during the first 3 million years of the solar system. The meteorites that formed more than about a million years after the start of the solar system contain significantly more nickel-60 than do those that formed earlier, the team found. In a neighborhood of young stars, only a supernova could have produced iron-60, the parent of...

The team studied two gamma-ray flares in mid-2005 from the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Markarian 501. They compared gammas in two energy ranges, from 1.2 to 10 tera-electron-volts (TeV) and from 0.25 to 0.6 TeV. The first group arrived on Earth four minutes later than the second. One team member, physicist John Ellis of CERN, says: "The significance of the time lag is above 95%, and the magnitude of the effect is beyond the sensitivity of previous experiments." Either the high-energy gammas were released later (because of how they were generated) or they propagated more slowly.

Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped...

Did An 8th Century Gamma Ray Burst Irradiate Earth?Science DailyJanuary 21,2013 A nearby short duration gamma-ray burst may be the cause of an intense blast of high-energy radiation that hit the Earth in the 8th century, according to new research led by astronomers Valeri Hambaryan and Ralph NeuhÓ“user. The two scientists, based at the Astrophysics Institute of the University of Jena in Germany, publish their results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2012 scientist Fusa Miyake announced the detection of high levels of the isotope Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10 in tree rings formed in 775 CE,...