Sun blasts out highest-energy radiation ever recorded, raising questions for solar physics

Solar physicist learning more about the sun . . .

" 'After looking at six years' worth of data, out popped this excess of gamma rays,' Meher Un Nisa, a postdoctoral research associate at Michigan State University and co-author of a new paper about the findings released Wednesday (Aug. 3), said in a statement. 'When we first saw it, we were like, 'We definitely messed this up. The sun cannot be this bright at these energies.' "
"It's all thanks to a unique lens on the cosmos called the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, or HAWC. In short, this observatory, completed in the spring of 2015, is a facility specifically designed to observe particles associated with very high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays, the latter of which are equally energetic but also mysterious in that they often travel across the universe without exhibiting a clear starting point."