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鈥楳onkey King鈥 in groundbreaking space journey
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A CHINESE satellite, nicknamed 鈥淢onkey King,鈥 is not only searching for invisible dark matter, but also exploring the origin of cosmic rays, high energy particles that travel through space at nearly the speed of light.
An international research team has conducted a precise measurement of the spectrum of protons, the most abundant component of cosmic rays, in an energy range from 40 GeV to 100 TeV (one TeV is 1 trillion electron volts, corresponding to 1 trillion times the energy of visible light) with China鈥檚 Dark Matter Particle Explorer, also known as 鈥Wukong鈥 or 鈥淢onkey King.鈥
This is the first time that an experiment directly measured cosmic ray protons up to 100 TeV with high precision.
The measured spectrum shows that the proton flux increases at hundreds of billions of electron volts and then drops at around 14 TeV, indicating the existence of a new spectral feature of cosmic rays, said Chang Jin, the principal investigator of DAMPE and the director of the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
鈥淭he new finding is of great importance in helping scientists understand the source and acceleration of cosmic rays in the Milky Way,鈥 said Yuan Qiang, a researcher at PMO.
Discovered in 1912, cosmic rays are still largely an enigma. They are the direct samples of matter from outside the solar system. Physicists are still pondering where they come from and how they can be accelerated to ultra-high energies.
Now scientists have found that most cosmic rays are atomic nuclei. All the natural elements in the periodic table are present in cosmic rays. About 90 percent of them are the nuclei of hydrogen (protons); about 9 percent are helium nuclei (alpha particles).
And the other heavier elements, electrons, gamma rays, neutrinos and antimatter particles make up the remaining 1 percent.
Since most cosmic rays are charged, their paths through space are deflected by magnetic fields. On their journey to the Earth, the magnetic fields of the galaxy, the solar system and the Earth scramble their flight paths so much that we can no longer know exactly where they came from.
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