Gamma rays from the sun are acting weird and nobody knows why

There’s something wrong with the sunshine. A nine-year survey of the sun’s gamma rays has turned up two surprises: an unexpected dip in low-energy gamma rays, and far more high-energy gamma rays than theory predicts. And we’re not sure what’s going on.

“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…