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Supernovae are Found to be Super-Efficient Particle Accelerators

10/01/2009 02:22AM

Supernovae are Found to be Super-Efficient Particle Accelerators

Highly energetic particles bombard the Earth's atmosphere continuously. The energy of these particles can be even higher than the energy of particles accelerated by the most powerful accelerator on Earth, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Scientists believe that cosmic particles can be accelerated by the energy provided in supernova explosions. The supernova creates a shock wave that heats up the surrounding gas. Scientists think that the outward expanding shock wave is responsible for accelerating these particles, which consist mostly of protons moving at relativistic speeds. Researchers at the Astronomical Institute Utrecht in The Netherlands were able to measure how much energy is removed from the shocked gas in these stellar explosions and used to accelerate the particles, solving a long-standing astronomical question of whether or not stellar explosions do indeed produce these accelerated particles.


Comments:

  • newtgem [Ronald Abraham]
  • 10/02/2009 02:12PM
Shock waves generated within big supernovas create the necessary force to progressively fuse heavier and heavier elements beyond iron. (I believe S&T shoed a diagram of the "onionskin effect" of concetric thresholds within supernova.)<br><br>In reading this, I asked myself if the shock wave is relativisitc in nature. I have always assumed that a collider was essentially creating a relativisitic shock wave we could witness at the quantum level.<br><br>So my question is if we are just seeing the flip side of the coin. In essence is a proton riding a shock wave of virtually infinite density moving at a high percentage of C so that it might make it to earth and interact with the first electron it meets in our atmosphere?<br><br>Soory, I have no physics education other than what I have read. My terminology likely sucks. It's just that shock waves always have such incredible energy density; such a miniscule concentrated mass escaping at such velocity represents the highest potential particle energy level possible in the universe. What stops it?
  • crw4096 [Charles Wright]
  • 10/03/2009 04:57PM
The shock wave dissipates under the "inverse square law". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law<br><br>Consider a spherical shock wave propagating away from the supernova. Then the energy in the wave becomes spread over a sphere of larger and larger diameter. The surface area of the sphere increases with the square of the distance, so the energy that passes through some unit area of the sphere decreases as 1/(distance^2). The energy of individual particles more or less remains the same, but there are fewer of them per unit area. Also, since they are charged particles, they are flung around by electric and magnetic fields. So overall, the shock wave dissipates with distance.<br>