Psience Quest

Quote:Scientists discovered in 1912 that subatomic particles — the building blocks of matter, such as protons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and quarks — hit the Earth every day. They later learned they were hitting us with an energy that surpasses the power of human-built particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider. Some of these particles carry so much energy that scientists have been puzzled as to which objects in space are powerful enough to create them.

Now, we have an important clue as to at least one object that may be responsible for some of these particles, often called “cosmic rays,” that hit the Earth. In two new studies appearing Thursday in Science, a large team of physicists reports that one of the sources of cosmic rays is a special type of galaxy called a blazar. Blazars have supermassive black holes at the center of them that rip apart matter into its constituent parts, and then blast subatomic particles off like a laser cannon into space.