You’d think that for something as huge and overt as the Sun, hiding things about itself might not be possible, especially when there’s multiple probes and telescopes measuring its every activity. And yet, researchers recently found something very surprising about the star.
For years now, the Sun has reportedly been emitting highly bright light in the form of an extraordinary amount of gamma rays — which carry the most energy out of any other wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum. The emissions equate to approximately 1 trillion electron volts, making it the highest-energy radiation to ever be documented from our solar system’s star!
While these gamma rays cannot harm us and do not quite reach Earth, their telltale signatures are discernable, provided one is using the right tools, such as the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC.
Considering how it operates 24/7, the HAWC has an edge over other ground-based telescopes that cannot look at the Sun because they only function at night. Further, it doesn’t look like a regular telescope either.
Seated between two volcanoes in Southern Mexico, at an altitude of 13,500 feet, the HAWC can detect the gamma rays using its elaborate network of 300 massive water tanks, each filled with 200 metric tons of water.
When high-energy particles from space collide with the purified water in the tanks, it results in a phenomenon known as Cherenkov radiation — a bluish glow resulting from electrically charged particles moving at certain speeds through a medium, in this case water.
“This shows that HAWC is adding to our knowledge of our galaxy at the highest energies, and it’s opening up questions about our very own Sun. It’s making us see things in a different light. Literally,” said Nisa, one of almost 100 scientists who contributed to the paper.
Meanwhile, the data collected by HAWC over a six-year period (between 2015-2021) also shows that the gamma rays have a tendency to occur when the Sun is witnessing a relatively dormant phase of its 11-year solar cycle.
In the future, scientists will be working on solving how the Sun’s magnetic field plays a role in giving rise to the high energy gamma rays.
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