From Vedic times, Indians referred to a country called Uttara Kuru which was supposed to be beyond the Himalayas. In the earliest references, such as that in the Aitareya Brahmana, it was a holy land from which many Vedic people (such as the Kurus) came.
It was the country where the Soma vine grew plentiful on the slopes of the Munjavan mountain; it was home to the holy mountains of Meru & Kailasa. It was inhabited by godlike people not bound by human conventions. Even in Ayurveda, we can find reference to this place.
In later sources both the description & location become fanciful. In the Puranas as well as Buddhist sources such as the Dirgha Nikaya it becomes a magical island north of Mount Meru. Some recent researchers have tried to identify Mount Munjavan with Mount Muztagh Ata in the Pamirs. This will locate the Uttara Kuru country to the immediate north & east of Tibet.
However, a holy land as per Hindu belief has come to the spotlight again with scientists discovering highest cosmic gamma rays in this region which supports the facts mentioned in the ancient Hindu Scriptures. The energy of the gamma rays is as high as 450 TeV, equivalent to 45 billion times of the energy of X-rays for medical diagnosis, researchers from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Scientists believe that those energetic gamma rays were from the Crab Nebula, a famous supernova remnant in the constellation Taurus, about 6,500 light-years away from Earth.
“This pioneering work opens a new window for the exploration of the extreme universe. The detection of gamma rays above 100 TeV is a key to understanding the origin of very-high-energy cosmic rays, which has been a mystery since their discovery in 1912. With further observations using this new window, we expect to identify the origin of cosmic rays in our Galaxy,” say the scientists.
The discovery will be published in the journal Physical Review Letters later in July.
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