Auger Telescope

A new era has begun. Now it is possible to look at the sky through a new window. Before it was mainly photons collected on the telescopes, then some other particles were detected, like electrons coming from the Sun. When the magnetic field of the Earth was better understood, with Van Allen belts and other important parts, one could know the properties of those particles. It is difficult to pinpoint the origin of cosmic rays coming from other stars. The reason is the existence of magnetic fields in between. Low energy particles get deflected. Actually it is good for life, otherwise the amount of radiation coming to the biosphere would've made life on Earth impossible.

To have a cosmic ray point to its source, it is necessary that the fields in between do not deflect them. The farther away a ray comes from, the more likely it is to be deflected. Only the highest energy cosmic rays can point to the source. Actually there is a fundamental limit, first proposed by Greisen, Zatsepin, and Kuzmin, to how much a cosmic ray can travel between galaxies before it is stopped by the Microwave Background Radiation, which is a relic of the origin of the Universe. Only objects a few hundreds of millions of parsecs away can reach the Earth. Not only that, these three scientists also understood that there is a maximum energy that any particle coming from these galaxies can have. Bigger energies only lead to faster annihilation, due to the composition of the matter between us and them.

We have then a gigantic telescope, on the far side there is a point source of very energetic particles, then the intergalactic space, and then a detector on Earth. Knowing the three components we have a new window to the world.

What can we learn using these telescopes?

The composition of the source, the matter in between, and the composition of the cosmic rays.

Here I propose a possible scenario that could increase our knowledge of the Universe:

In the center of a galaxy, fifty million parsecs away or so, there is a group of very massive black holes capable of producing particles that have an energy of 10¹⁹ eV when they reach Earth. There are only a few of those collected in an area of one square kilometer in one century here on Earth. These charged nuclei are detected on the Auger observatory in Argentina; then maybe we could determine if they come from a microscopic black hole produced by the enormous black holes with huge energies in those Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), at a local energy of 10¹² eV on the AGN, or more. Gia Dvali, from NYU, claims that only the known particles with masses up to this energy (1 TeV) can be produced, even though there must be huge numbers of more massive particles in our Universe. All the other particles cannot be produced by these microscopic black holes because of the law of conservation of energy.

Dvali's theory explains why gravity is so weak, 10³⁶ times weaker than the other known forces. He thinks it is because there are these many copies of the particles we know. If one can prove that the particles detected by the Auger collaboration - where his colleague from NYU Glennys Farrar works - come from this process, then we would know why gravity is so weak.

To prove his theory, he expects more control of the experimental conditions at the LHC in Geneva next year, though. Maybe we already have proof.

I do not know.