A photon, or particle of sunshine, from the largest cosmic explosion for the reason that Large Bang, nicknamed “the BOAT” (for the brightest of all time), shouldn’t have reached Earth. That’s, except it defied guidelines outlined by Einstein. Now scientists could know the way it did this, with new analysis suggesting how the high-energy photon could have survived a journey of greater than two billion light-years with out being absorbed.
The BOAT, a gamma-ray burst formally designated GRB 221009A, was first detected on Oct. 9, 2022. Among the many ocean of photons from the occasion that rained down on our planet was the highest-energy photon ever detected originating from a gamma-ray burst. It was detected by Carpet, an ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector situated on the Baksan Observatory within the Russian Caucasus.
The issue is, in line with all present guidelines of physics, a particle with such excessive vitality should not attain Earth from an explosion occurring such an enormous distance away. That is as a result of area is not empty; it’s crammed with a “fossil” radiation area of photons left over from simply after the Big Bang called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It should be virtually impossible for a high-energy photon to travel 2 billion light-years without interacting with a CMB photon and being transformed. And still it came.
“We started from a very simple question: how did this photon survive a journey that, according to known physics, should have destroyed it?” team leader Giorgio Galanti from the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) said in a statement. “The new data from the Carpet experiment showed us that the explanations proposed so far were no longer sufficient.
“We therefore looked for a theoretical scenario capable of consistently describing what we observe, without resorting to arbitrary corrections to the equations.”
A hypothetical transformation
To investigate the mystery of how this high-energy photon reached our planet, Galanti and colleagues turned to incredibly light hypothetical particles called axion-like particles (ALPs).
ALPS could serve as a solution to this puzzle via a mechanism that would allow photons to transform into ALPs as they travel and then convert back into photons as they reach the Milky Way. The problem is that this still can’t account for such a high-energy photon.
This team combined the idea of ALPs with a proposed violation of one of the fundamentals of Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity called “Lorentz invariance.”
In short, Lorentz invariance says that observers moving at different speeds should experience the same physical laws. The team tested the idea that Lorentz invariance could be violated at high energies, thus changing how photons propagate through space.
In the scenario devised by the team the photon would have avoided being wiped out by interactions with the CMB as it would avoid interactionc with these fossil photons.
The new research therefore implies that at high enough energies, photons can take a “fast lane” through a transparent universe, dodging the physics that would normally force their destructive transformation.
Interestingly, there is some evidence relating to the BOAT that seemingly backs this theory. According to the picture developed by the team, this high-energy photon should have arrived at Earth around one hour after lower-energy particles of light originating from the BOAT. Indeed, that is exactly what happened.
“The most interesting aspect of our work is that, for the first time, it brings together two ideas that until now had been developed separately,” team member Marco Roncadelli of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) said. “If future observations confirmed this scenario, the universe would become a natural laboratory for studying quantum gravity at energies enormously higher than those achievable by any accelerator built on Earth.”
The team’s research is available on the repository site arXiv and has been accepted for publication within the journal Bodily Assessment Letters.