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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.
But in 1912, Austrian-American physicist Victor Hess measured the ambient radiation level in a high-altitude balloon and discovered it was much higher than at ground level, even during an eclipse when the Sun was blocked. This meant the radiation had to be coming from space. But we cannot easily tell where they come from. Cosmic rays are charged particles, which means their direction of travel changes when they encounter a magnetic field.The magnetic deflection effect provides the basic technology for old cathode ray tube monitors and televisions, which use it to steer electrons toward the screen to create a picture.
While we now understand this general picture, most of the details are missing. The uniformity of cosmic rays across the sky tells us that cosmic ray directions randomly change, but we have no good way of measuring how fast this process happens.Terzan 5 and the displaced gamma rays It just happens to be plunging through the galaxy right now. Because this plunge takes place at hundreds of kilometres per second, the cluster sweeps up a cloak of magnetic fields around itself, like the tail of a comet plunging through the solar wind.
And here is where the magnetic fluctuations come in. If the cosmic rays stayed well-aligned with the tail, we would never see them, but thanks to magnetic fluctuations their directions start to change.
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