Ambitious observatory to probe universe ’s most powerful particle accelerators

Along with the gentle light of stars and galaxies, Earth receives much rarer and more aggressive signals from the cosmos: photons that slam into the atmosphere with 10 trillion times the energy of visible light. Just how they reach such enormous energies is a puzzle, but a group of mostly European countries will soon start to build an observatory that will trace them to their sources by watching for the flash of their atmospheric impacts. By 2026, if all goes well, the €330 million Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) should be pinpointing the cosmic powerhouses that spawn the photons and probing their inner workings. Other observatories have already glimpsed more than 250 gamma ray sources in the Milky Way and beyond. With dozens of telescopes split between sites on Spain’s Canary Islands and Chile’s Atacama Desert, CTAO should have the sensitivity and sharp vision to find five times as many sources and figure out how they tick. “CTAO is a tremendous step forward,” says Werner Hofmann of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, spokesperson for the CTA consortium, a group of 1500 scientists that will analyze the data. “We’ll be able to pin down accelerator mechanisms and sources.” With most of its funders in Europe, the CTAO team applied in 2018 for official status as a European research infrastructure consortium—a step needed for funding to flow. Approval is expected from the European Union soon. At that point construction can begi...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research