Cosmic rays accelerated by exploded stars

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have shown that cosmic rays from the Milky Way are very efficiently accelerated in the remnants of exploded stars.

Cosmic rays are extremely energetic particles – mostly protons – moving at close to the speed of light. They originate from outside our Solar System and are constantly bombarding the Earth’s atmosphere at a rate of some 100,000 per square metre per second.