A source of cosmic rays radiating energies 100 times greater than those achieved at the largest terrestrial particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) — has been found in the innermost region of our Milky Way galaxy.
The source was revealed after a detailed analysis of the data collected by the H.E.S.S. observatory in Namibia, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
H.E.S.S. observatory is being run by an international collaboration of 42 institutions in 12 countries and has been mapping the centre of our galaxy in very high energy gamma rays for over the past 10 years. “Somewhere within the central 33 light years of the Milky Way there is an astrophysical source capable of accelerating protons to energies of about one petaelectronvolt, continuously for at least 1,000 years,” said Emmanuel Moulin from the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre in France.