© NASA
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope
"The sun is much weirder than we thought," says John Beacom at Ohio State University in Columbus. He and his colleagues examined data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope taken from 2008 to 2017.
Gamma rays are constantly being produced in the sun as high-energy protons from cosmic rays smash into gas particles in the solar atmosphere. The sun's magnetic field directs the paths of these protons, flinging some of the resulting gamma rays towards Earth where we can detect them.
Overall, Beacom and his colleagues saw gamma rays with energies ranging from about 1 gigaelectronvolt (GeV) to about 200 GeV. But between 32 and 56 GeV, there was an abrupt dip - there were only about half as many gamma rays at those energies than the average over all energies.
"It seems inexplicable, random and strange," says team member Kenny Ng at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. "In terms of energy scale, there is nothing special about 30-50 GeV."
Comment: Not only is the story fake and being used to push an agenda, but considering recent discoveries, it's clear that our knowledge of the natural world is a work in progress; sometimes twisted by bias and other times just because we've yet to make the discovery, see: Super-colony of 1.5 Million Adélie penguins discovered on Danger islands, Antarctica
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