SHOCK waves radiating out from galaxy clusters could be the puzzling powerhouses that have boosted some cosmic rays to ultra-high energies.
Joydeep Bagchi at the University of Pune, India, and his team picked up giant arcs of radio waves around the Abell 3376 galaxy cluster using the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. “We’ve seen similar structures produced by shock waves around supernovae, but never on this scale – 6 million light years across,” he says.
The team believes that these shock waves could have been produced either by collisions of matter as galaxies are pulled into the cluster…
