A MYSTERIOUS X-ray glow that surrounds the sun may be evidence for the existence of an exotic particle that physicists have been hunting for decades.
Astronomers have been puzzled by the sun's X-ray halo since it was first detected in the 1940s. Curiosity deepened when the Japanese satellite Yohkoh, launched in 1991, sent back X-ray pictures showing spectacular flares streaming from sunspots and a gentle glow emanating from the sun's outer atmosphere.
But the surface of the sun is not hot enough to produce such a bright X-ray glow. So where are the X-rays coming from? Konstantin Zioutas and his colleagues think that heavyweight particles called axions could be the source.
Zioutas, a theorist who works at the University of Thessaloniki in Greece and the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that the X-rays are produced by the decay of axions. According to his team's model, axions are ...
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