Using the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), an international research team led by the Institute of High Energy Physics, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences detected a dozen ultra-high-energy cosmic accelerators within the Milky Way, and discovered gamma ray photons registering at up to 1.4 petaelectronvolts (PeV), the highest energy light ever registered.
The findings overturn the traditional understanding of the Milky Way by proving the existence of cosmic accelerators capable of accelerating charged particles to more than 1 PeV, and open up an era of ultra-high-energy gamma astronomy. The study was published in the journal Nature in May.