In a ground-breaking discovery, the Telescope Array Collaboration has detected an extremely energetic particle, named "Amaterasu" after the Japanese celestial sun goddess. This cosmic rays event surpasses the energy achieved by artificial particle accelerators by more than a million times. The origins of such high-energy particle remain mysterious, as tracing back the arrival direction does not reveal an obvious source, for example a galaxy.
Less than 5% of the Universe is made of normal, visible matter; the rest is dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%). No wonder then that understanding the bigger fraction of matter is a fundamental goal of astrophysics and cosmology. Federico Urban from FZU got an EEA and Norway grant to foster international collaboration on several aspects of dark matter.
