A Galactic 'Comet' Terzan 5 Just Illuminated A 100-Year-Old Cosmic Mystery
NDTV
Cosmic rays are something no one expected to be there. When radioactivity was first discovered in the 1890s, scientists thought all sources of radiation were on Earth.
When my colleagues and I set to work on a century-old cosmic mystery, we found an unexpected celestial laboratory in Terzan 5, a dense star cluster currently plunging through our galaxy at breakneck speed.
This stellar oddity has allowed us to study the behaviour of cosmic rays – high-energy particles whose erratic paths through space have baffled astronomers since their discovery in 1912.
By observing radiation produced by Terzan 5's cosmic rays, we've achieved a scientific first: measuring how quickly these particles change direction due to fluctuations in interstellar magnetic fields. Our research is published today in Nature Astronomy.
