What's a Blazar? A Galactic Bakery for Cosmic Rays
In 1911 and 1912, an Austrian physicist named Victor Hess took to the sky in a series of risky hot-air balloon trips—for science. Hess had discovered cosmic rays—extremely energetic protons and atomic nuclei that travel from the far reaches of the universe to bombard every patch of Earth, every second of every day. Since Hess's discovery, they have only found a couple astronomical objects within the Milky Way that produce lower-energy cosmic rays. Starting with a single signal—a flash of light in a detector at the South Pole—and combining it with telescope data from a collaboration of over a thousand people, astrophysicists have traced the origin of some of Earth’s cosmic rays to a blazar, a type of galaxy, 4 billion light years away. “We've learned that these active galaxies are responsible for accelerating particles and cosmic rays,” says physicist Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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