Per:
The Sun Is Stranger Than Astrophysicists Imagined
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"But there are no good guesses about how the sun’s magnetic field might create the dip in the gamma-ray spectrum at 10 trillion trillion hertz. It’s such an unusual feature that some experts doubt that it’s real. But if the absence of gamma rays around that frequency is a miscalculation or a problem with Fermi’s instruments, no one has figured out the cause. “It does not seem to be any instrumental effect,” said Elena Orlando, an astrophysicist at Stanford and a member of the Fermi team."...
Why are there no good guesses ? Since there are no good guesses, how about some wild, crazy ones ! Per some random web photon energy calculator a gamma at 1019 hertz would have an energy of 41356845 Mev. Then per some random web E=mc2 calculator 41356845Mev has an equivalent mass of 44398.2 atomic mass units. This is ~40,000 protons (hydrogen nuclei) or ~800 iron nuclei. The cosmic ray base proton(~1amu) itself is therefore dwarfed by the kinetic energy it carries. Now we could just assume chaotic, heat generating interaction but that is unlikely to generate a notch. In this realm of energies, especially in the presence of mammoth magnetic fields, surprising things might indeed happen. The notch in the gamma spectrum is, itself, a surprising thing.
In the visible spectrum, there is the well known electron energy level quantized absorption notch creation. What do we have for notch creation at these energies ? I assert that nuclear processes (involving energy to mass conversion) is the prime candidate in this realm of energies. Even those would involve processes creating 40k protons or 800 iron nuclei to digest a single cosmic ray of this specific energy. With severe physical alignments created by intense magnetic fields such wholesale absorption of energy might just be plausible. I am curious to know whether their "notch" is actually a set of semi-periodic notches. Does anyone have any gross corrections to my swag ? Can anyone detail any further analysis like conservation of charge ?... Can anyone think of any other alternatives for high energy gamma notch creation ?
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thewildotter
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