Mysterious ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays can be generated not by giant stars or black holes-blazars, but by exotic "wormholes", tunnels in the fabric of space-time. This is the conclusion reached by physicists from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University, who posted an article in the arXiv.org electronic library.
Cosmic rays are elementary particles and nuclei of atoms of different elements, accelerated to near-light speeds. For more than a century they have been considered one of the main mysteries for science and sources of danger to the health of astronauts and astronauts.
To date, there is no consensus among scientists about their origins. Some astronomers believe that these particles are accelerated in the hot remnants of exploding stars inside the Milky Way, while others suggest that their source is black holes in distant galaxies. Even more interesting, the third group of researchers insists that they are generated by the decays of dark matter particles in the center of the galaxy.
Two years ago, physicists found the first hints that virtually all such rays are of extragalactic origin, having captured more than a hundred cosmic charged particles of ultrahigh energies. Nevertheless, their sources and typical distances to them still remain a mystery to scientists.
Two Russian theoretical physicists, Alexander Kirillov and Elena Savelova from the Bauman Moscow State Technical University in Moscow, have found hints that the most powerful extragalactic cosmic rays may not be produced by black holes or giant stars, as scientists from NASA recently suggested, but more exotic objects. so-called wormholes.
With this word, scientists designate a kind of "tunnels" connecting two points located in different regions of space or time. Despite their fantastic description, their existence allows Einstein's theory of relativity and all its major extensions.
On the other hand, astronomers have not yet found such phenomena. This is due to the fact that to create such a tunnel in the structure of space-time, a form of matter is needed that would have a negative energy density, or an almost "invisible" object, similar to a black hole.
Savelova and Kirillov became interested in how the appearance of an exit or entrance into such a "wormhole" would affect the life of the surrounding space and the entire galaxy as a whole. One of their main features, as noted by scientists, will be that many of these structures, which emerged in the first moments of the life of the Universe, will have their own magnetic field.
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Its "poles" will be located in the vicinity of the entrance and exit of such a tunnel, which will greatly affect the movement of charged particles through such cosmic wormholes, capturing them and forcing them to move in one direction.
As the calculations of MSTU specialists show, if in the vicinity of such a magnetic "funnel" there is a galactic wind, a stream of charged particles ejected by a supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way or other "starry metropolis", then the whole "wormhole" will turn into a kind of particle accelerator.
Its power, according to physicists, is enough to accelerate typical charged particles to an energy of 900 gigaelectronvolts, which is comparable to the force with which a flying mosquito hits a mosquito net and the force of collisions in experiments at the LHC.
In favor of the existence of such "wormholes", as the researchers note, several factors speak at once. For example, in intergalactic and interstellar space in recent years, astronomers have found many regions with strong magnetic fields that have appeared out of nowhere.
In addition, the Chinese orbital observatory DAMPE, which monitors ultra-high-energy particles, recorded a sharp and inexplicable drop in the number of cosmic rays with energies above 900 GeV two years ago.
Then scientists considered this anomaly to be a trace of the decays of dark matter in the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies. Russian physicists believe that its real source could be "wormholes" that generate a large number of cosmic rays with relatively low energies.
How can I test this idea? According to physicists, each "wormhole" will have its own limit on the maximum energy of particles, which will be reflected in the structure of their spectrum. If further observations of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays indicate the existence of yet another similar "failure," then the theory of Savelova and Kirillov will receive the first confirmation of its correctness.
