What Are Cosmic Rays?

Who or what is shooting crazy high energy particles at us?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
The universe is chuck filled with crazy stuff, weird, weird stuff.
Every time you look out into the universe, every time
you build a new telescope, you see something else weird
that you don't understand. Things or aliens, things but made
by aliens. I mean, there's all You're always finding things
that don't make any sense. Usually the procedure is, you know,

(00:29):
you see something you don't understand, and then you try
to explain it using things you do understand, and you
get more and more elaborate explanations. But usually you figure
it out or it stands, you know, for decades as
an enduring mystery. That's a clue that there's something out
there that we don't understand. Its truth is out there.
The truth is out there. It's whispering to us, there's

(00:49):
something here that's interesting. Hi. I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist.
And I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist. Welcome back to

(01:12):
our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe. Daniel and
Jorge have a strange pause in the title of their podcast,
Daniel and Jorge need a Banana stat Daniel and Jorge
tried to explain the universe, but they ran out of bananas. Yeah.

(01:35):
In this podcast, we try to take things in the
universe and explain them to you because the universe is
filled with wild, wacky stuff that gives us insight into
how the universe works. And so we're trying to take
it apart, piece by piece and make sure it makes
sense to you. Yeah, all the pieces that we understand
and all the pieces that not even physicists understand. And
those are the most fun bits, the ones that are mysteries,

(01:56):
those that are clues as to the next revolution in physics,
the that I hope will lead to a Nobel Prize
discovery hopefully by me or my graduate students or not,
or year leads to years of frustration and nothing. That's
that's research. Or you are a listener, and hey, if
you get a Nobel Prize winning idea listening to this podcast,

(02:17):
at least give us a little bit of credit. Yes,
give us a shout out. At least when you go
to Stockholm, you know, nod in a wink. We'll we'll
understand you're talking about us. Yeah, just say our our
website and then we'll be we'll call it. We'll call
it even. But you know that's a joke, but it
is true that we're gonna be talking today about a
topic which, if somebody could explain it would almost certainly
give them a Nobel prize. Anytime you can explain a

(02:38):
decades long standing mystery in physics, you know, that's that's
worth something. That's right Today on the podcast, we'll be
talking about cosmic raise, and not just any cosmic raise,
super duper crazy high energy cosmic raise. Is that the
official physics for them? Yeah? What is the acronym for

(03:03):
that super duper crazy high such as saying that in
conferences all the time. That's right, you can you should
add some numbers to that though at the end, like
three three cosmic rays. Yeah no, but we run out
of we run out of prephysics prefixist to even described
as a high energy of particles that we see from space. Okay, yeah, yeah,

(03:25):
so yeah. The first time I heard the words cosmic
rays was actually when I was about nine years old.
If you can't believe it. Were you talking to some
dude named Ray and he was like, I'm cosmic close close.
I was reading, uh, some comics by Stanley, the late
Great Stanley. I don't know if you know this, but
the Fantastic Four, their origin is tied to this idea

(03:48):
of cosmic rays. There's so much overlap between physics and cartoons, right,
I mean not just this podcast, but like so much
of concepts and physics ends up in cartoons. You know, ray, Asian,
cosmic rays, all this stuff. It's just like it's fuel
for people's imagination. Yeah, no, I think I think they
mean comics in general have always sort of tried to

(04:10):
capture the public anxiety and and the public kind of zeitgeist,
and to kind of put in saying, cartoonists have been
making physicists look bad for I've been making you look
cool like superheroes. I can just imagine you, imagine you
in spandex. Daniel, Oh wait, Hard rather not um come out?

(04:31):
Mike dropped. So yeah. And the Fantastic Four, the they
get their superpowers by flying off into space and then
getting bombarded by cosmic rays, and then when they land
back on Earth they have these amazing superpowers like stretch
and getting going visible and turning to a flaming torch.
So that's how I know about the cosmic rays. Is
that about correct? You know? Do they give you superpowers?

(04:53):
I finally totally get I totally recommend you go into
into space and bade yourself in consmic race. You'll definitely
get super ours. That's accurate. Um. I love how cartoons
and comic books especially have been like using concepts in
physics that are like weakly understood and then making us
look like bad guys. Right, all these it's always like

(05:14):
this new technology is going to cause the rise of
a crazy villain or you know, but to be honest,
in cosmic ray is all these things. But let's be honest, Daniel,
Do you know for sure that getting bathed in cosmic
rays will not give you superpowers? Do you know that
for sure? Um? No, I think if you bathe yourself
in cosmic grads, you're very likely to die. Sons listeners,

(05:34):
if you're about to board your own private spaceship, don't.
So it sounds important for everyone to know what a
cosmic ray is. But we were wondering if you out
there and knew what it means when you say the
words cosmic rays, what are cosmic rays? Yeah? Exactly. So
I went around and I asked random people, one of
whom is my wife at what is a cosmic ray?
Do you know what a cosmic ray is Here's what

(05:56):
they had to say. Um, a cosmic ray is a
particle that is originating from an unknown part of the universe,
and it can go through any kind of matter. So
they come pumbling to the Earth and probably reveal interesting
secrets about what's going on. And we're trying to figure
out how to do that. I heard waves in there somewhere,

(06:18):
So maybe cosmic surfers array that comes from the sky
that can be seen from a telescope. Oh lord, I
feel like I want to say that's like strong radiation
from the Sun, but I'm not sure. Yes, I would
guess it has to do a solar raise the sun
and something related to that. Okay, cosmic raise, they power

(06:42):
Superman be funny of your wife was like, wait, how
do you know about Ray? She's like, he wasn't here
last night. I don't know if you're talking about, but
he is cosmic. This podcast just got not safe for
work once again. This is what happens when we record
at night. Why I tell you it's a little wonky.

(07:04):
It's a d j U late night after dark. But
most people seem to have heard about cosmic craze, and
one fellow even said, oh, yeah, they power Superman. So
there's definitely the cosmic grave physics cartooning connection there. Okay,
they power Superman? Come on, who is this person? Everyone knows?
That's not right? Not everybody knows that. So where's Superman

(07:27):
get his power? Does he eat? Does Superman actually eat?
Have you seen Superman eat? Um? Superman? No, he doesn't know.
He doesn't need to eat. He gets energy from the Sun.
The Sun says, those are cosmic rays. Jorge, what? Okay,

(07:47):
So let's break it down. So what Daniel is a
cosmic ray? A cosmic ray is a particle from space
that hits the Earth. Ray is just another name for particle.
Cosmic just means it comes from space. So cosmic rays
are just space particles space particles. Yeah, but space particles
was vetoed by the physics committee that came up with
a name for these things, because cosmic rays sounds so

(08:09):
much cooler. But was it? Why do they have this name?
Were they just named before we knew about particles? Like
what's the difference? Like did we confuse raisin particles before? Oh? Yeah, um,
you know, we knew about things like X rays and
all sorts of other kinds of rays before we understood particles.
So yeah, cosmic rays have been have been known about
for you know, a hundred years, so we didn't know

(08:31):
they were like little bits. Yeah, it's only it's more
recently that people understood their particles. But you know, everything
that's a particle from space officially could be called the
cosmic ray, and that includes photons from the sun. Random
dude on the streets, know it's more about Superman than
you do. I think they know more about physics than
I do, clearly, but I doubt they know more about

(08:51):
that person. You should do this. They know more physics
and no more cosmics, no more continent boom that qualifies
them to take over. Okay, So it just means any
kind of energy or particle that's coming front space and
hits the Earth. Okay, that's right. Okay, but that's not
a very exciting answer. Like photons, You can't just call
sunlight cosmic grades. You can, it wouldn't be very exciting.

(09:12):
You're right, but the cosmic rays that we're interested in
are not the normal, everyday speam of sunlight that comes
from the sun right into cosmic grades were interested in
are the weird ones. It's not just photons hitting the Earth,
it's other kinds of particles, that's right. The Sun produces
a huge number of particles, right, not just photons, of course,
but neutrinos and protons and heavier stuff and all sorts

(09:35):
of stuff. The Sun is spewing stuff out. It's called
the solar wind. And we have so many names for
the same thing. Right, they're just space particles, but they're
cosmic rays. If they're here, they're space wind. If they're
there anyway, the Sun spews them all out loud. So
so that's that might be an interesting and new idea
for people, the fact that the Sun is not just
shining light, it's also shining stuff, like it's burping matter. Yeah,

(09:59):
I asolutely, because it's you know, it's a huge fusion reactor,
and fusion produces a lot of stuff. Yeah, So you
get protons, you get heavier elements, you get huge numbers
of neutrinos. I mean, we have um a hundred billion
neutrinos from the Sun passed through your fingernail every second.
So there's a lot of stuff coming from the Sun. Okay,
but neutrinos we don't feel, and they go right through

(10:22):
us right there. Like that, they're known as ghost particle.
That's right. So the reason we're not all constantly getting
superpowers from cosmic grades from the Sun is that most
of this stuff is we're shielded from most of this stuff.
So photons not dangerous neutrinos pass right through us. We haven't.
They can't affect us at all. Right, And for those
of you interested neutrinos, we have a whole podcast on that.

(10:44):
And then the other stuff, the stuff that's more dangerous
are charged particles like protons or heavier, heavier nuclei that
could really do some damage. These are more dangerous because
they're they're in a way bigger and more. They interact
with our cells in a very dangerous way, right, that's right. Yeah,
if you if a protons shot through you, it would
definitely interact with things in you. It could disturb your DNA,

(11:06):
it could give you cancer. It's not a good idea
to stand in the beam of protons. And there's a
huge number of protons coming from the Sun. Now, before
you start digging that shelter to protect yourself, um, you
already have a shelter, and that shelter is the is twofold.
One is the Earth's magnetic field, and the second is
the Earth's atmosphere. Hold on, I have so many questions
for you, but before we keep going, let's take a

(11:27):
short break. Okay, So the Sun is shooting stuff at us,
and it's coming all the way to Earth. So how

(11:47):
does the magnetic field protect us? Well, every charged particle
that hits the magnetic field bends. Magnetic fields are really
good at bending charged particles, and so instead of just
slamming right into the Earth, these things get deflected it
and sometimes they spiral along and end up at the
North Pole. And that's what you that's why you get
the Northern lights. You mean the planet Earth has a
force field. Yes, we have a force field. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,

(12:12):
And it's a good thing we do because otherwise we
don't have cancer. So we have a massive global anti
cancer shield. Wow. Okay, that's pretty crazy impressive stuff like
a force like a force field for for real. Said, also,
the atmosphere protects us, that's right, because a particle that
makes it through the magnetic field and hits the atmosphere

(12:32):
is not just going to fly all the way down
to Earth because the atmosphere is not transparent to charge
particles like a photon can fly through the atmosphere because
the atmosphere is mostly neutral particles, and it'll just fly
through all the nitrogen and oxygen and and get down
to Earth right, get down to the surface. But a
charge particle will slam into those things and will interact
with them. They'll break up those nuclei. It's sort of

(12:53):
like if a rock hits the Earth, right, it rarely
gets all the way down to the surface unless it's
huge smaller rocks, they do burn up. And that's what
we call it's what we see is shooting stars. Oh okay, yeah,
so basically every proton is like a super tiny little meteor,
a super tiny little shooting star. So most of them
don't make it down to the surface. Okay, they interact

(13:13):
with the air and the oxygen in our atmosphere before
it gets to us. Yeah, And you can think of
the atmosphere so like a really big mattress, and it
absorbs most of this energy, and so instead of having
one particle with a huge amount of energy, it spreads
it out, so you get like, you know, billions of particles,
each with a small amount of energy, which is much
less dangerous because they don't all hit you. It's kind

(13:36):
of like an billiards when you start with a like
a cluster of balls and you hit the first one,
that impact kind of spreads. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don't
want to get hit by the Cuba, all right. If
you get hit by the seven, then you know you're
not gonna be You're gonna be an okay shape. Okay.
But but it's surprising because the atmosphere is pretty thin,
isn't it kind of in comparison to the Earth and

(13:57):
to the Sun. It's like a thin layer of us.
But that you're saying that feeling naked, feeling naked when
when it comes to space now suddenly feeling vulnerable. Oh
my god, I need to put something else on. I
feel cosmicly. Yeah, the other Earth's atmospheres, you know, um uh,
it depends on where you want to call the edge
of the atmosphere. But it's not super thick compared to

(14:18):
the size of the Earth. That's true, just like the
oceans are not that deep compared to the size of
the Earth. The Earth is huge, and the atmosphere is
a thin layer protecting us from space. Yeah, I mean,
it's weird to think air would could be protecting us,
you know, it's um Yeah, And you know they go
hand in hand because the magnetic field is protecting our atmosphere.
If we lost our magnetic field suddenly, then all these

(14:38):
the solar wind would blow away our atmosphere. So the
so the magnetic field is doing two things. It's being
a cool force field and it's kind of also protecting
our sun block. Basically exactly exactly, you can think of
the atmospheres like the insulation, and the magnetic field is
like the you know, the aluminum sheeting on the outside

(14:59):
of your house that keeps the cold, cold, uncarrying space away,
and let's just hang out and relax safely on the
surface of the Earth. So then a cosmic race seems
to be like a commonplace thing. But what's kind of
interesting about them, you were telling me, is that they
vary in energy. Some of them are sort of you

(15:20):
never see, but some of them do have a lot
of energy. Yeah, So you study cosmic rays and you
see a lot of them that don't have that much energy.
You know, they're just pumped out by the sun, no
big deal. But you keep looking, and you keep looking,
and you find more and more that have higher and
higher energy, and you and as you look, you just
keep finding them at higher and higher energy and the
energy they get to is ridiculous. Like we see cosmic

(15:44):
rays meaning protons, so individual particles coming from space that
have absurd amounts of energy energy that we can't explain
through any mechanism. Okay, so let's break it down. So, um,
at the lower energies of these protons hitting the Earth,
what are the energies of these cosmic rays? So we
usually use a unit called electron volt and um it's

(16:06):
a sort of a unit using particle physics. I'll break
it down for you in a minute. But you know,
at the lower energies like ten to the eleven electron volts,
tend to the twelve electron volts, These are very common,
no big deal put out by the Sun. But things
start to get interesting around tend to the eighteen ten,
the nineteen ten to the twenty. We even see particles
around ten to the twenty one electron volts. So, for

(16:27):
those of you who aren't familiar with that unit, ten
to the twenty one electron bolts is like more than
a hundred jewels, which is as much energy is in
a major league fastball. So now you have a tiny
little particle with almost no mass. Right, A proton is
super tiny. It's got as much energy as an entire
fastball thrown as fast as a human can throw it,
which would hurt if it hit you right, It certainly would.

(16:50):
It certainly would. It would fly right through you and
cause all sorts of damage. You probably wouldn't notice it immediately.
So if you had to choose between getting hit by
a cosmic ray super hi energy cosmo gray, or a
major league fastball in the head, I'd probably choose cosmic gray, honestly,
because it's tiny and it might not do that much
damage as it slams into Is that right. Yeah, yeah,
it's just one, and you might get lucky. You might

(17:11):
miss everything useful and not cause cancer or something like that.
Oh I see yeah, okay, yeah, But these these particles
are super high energy, and the thing that's fascinating about
them is that we have no understanding with We don't
know anything in the universe that can make particles this
high energy. Okay, so by energy, do you mean like
the particle itself has a lot of energy or it's

(17:32):
just going faster. Yeah, that's the same thing. I mean,
the particle is a lot of kinetic energy. It's moving
super duper fast. It's not like it's hot, it's not
like it's vibrating. It's just it's it's really just trucking
along at a super high speed. Oh I see. So
the Sun is exploding, it's spewing out these protons, and
some of them go faster than others. Some of them
go faster than others, but some of them go faster

(17:52):
than the Sun can make. Right, So these protons we
don't think are coming from the Sun. We think they're
coming from something else. The Sun cannot make protons this fast.
How do we know it can't make them that fast?
How do we know it can't make them that fast? Well,
they don't seem to be coming from the Sun, right,
So we're getting from the back from like the nights.
We get them, Yeah, we get them from getting from

(18:12):
the actions in space. We're getting shot out from some
someplace in the universe we don't even know, right, the
cosmic rays aren't aren't just all coming from the Sun.
Some of them were getting bombarded by rays from all directions.
You're saying that's right, Lots of things in space make
cosmic grays, our son other sons, black holes, pulsars, all
those crazy things that all shoot out particles, and some

(18:34):
of them come to Earth any kind of violent kind
of you know, explosion continues. Crashing in the universe is
feeling out stuff. That's right, it's making cosmic rays, and
some of them land on Earth and their clue right there,
clues to what happened, What made this neutrino and what
made it come in this direction and go so fast?
What made this proton? What made this piece of iron
go so fast? Each one carries with it some information

(18:56):
about how and where it was born, and that's fascinating
because it tells us about places will never get to
and things will never see. Right. Okay, so sometimes some
of these cosmic rays have a super amount of energy
and we don't know where they're coming from. How often
are we getting bombarded by these high energy cosmic rays? Yea,
the higher the energy, the more the more rare they are.

(19:16):
So for example, at ten to the twenty one electron bolts,
which is like the highest energy particle anybody's ever seen.
You know, we think that those come about one per
square kilometer per few hundred years. One per square kilometers,
so very rare. Well, you know, the Earth has a
lot of square kilometers, So yeah, if you had a
square kilometer of cameras looking for these things, you wouldn't

(19:39):
would have to wait a long time to observe them.
But if you have a big detective you're a lot
of square kilometers, then you can see. You know, if
you had a few hundred square kilometers, you could see
one a year. Okay, so if you're listening to this
podcast and you draw one kilometer square around you, you
have to wait a hundred years to see one of
these high energy particles come down on you. That's right exactly.

(20:00):
But and to me, the most interesting thing about these
particles is that, um, we have no idea what could
be making them. I mean, I've asked after a physicists
have said, what's the highest energy particle? You imagine in
space anywhere in the universe, use anything you want. And
they start with like a supernova, huge explosion, particles going
super fast. Then they sling shot the stuff around a
black hole. Right then they ride waves from other stars

(20:23):
and they can't get close to the kind of particles
we see they at most can explain particles that like
tend to the seventeen tend of the eighteen, but we
see particles a thousand times more energetic than that. Right,
it's totally unexplained. There's nothing out there that can make
these kind of particles that we know of, which means
there's something new out there. It's like you're in the

(20:43):
middle of the jungle and you hear some strange animal
sound and there's no animal that you know of that
makes that sound or could make that sound exactly. And
that's right, you see. Yeah, you see tracks in the
in the in the in the mud, and you've never
seen an animal make that track before. And so that's
a clue that there's something out there waiting to be discovered.
You know, these are clues that are surfing along on

(21:04):
the cosmos, being delivered to Earth and saying there's something interesting,
pay attention. Wow. So that's a huge mystery. So but
you I'm sure if physicists have ideas like what could
these crazy high energy particles be or be coming from?
I think it's a fantastic four. Yeah, I think they're
form of vengeance. It's Stanley shooting from head. Yeah, exactly,

(21:27):
and I want to talk about that some more, but
first let's take a quick break. You know, physicists have ideas,
and the ideas are kind of wacky. And one reason
is that, you know, we haven't seen that many of

(21:49):
these things because they're pretty rare, and so you know,
we can't necessarily tell where in the universe they're coming from.
You only have a few dozen of these things ever seen,
and they don't like all come from the Sun or
from one point, and it's ways. But we do have
some fun ideas, you know, and one of my favorites,
of course, is maybe it's not some thing that's shooting
these cosmic rays at us. Maybe it's some one. Right.

(22:11):
We'd imagine if if we found all these cosmic rays,
and we got more of them somehow, and we could
tell if they're all coming from the same location, and
that location was like a planet orbiting some nearby star, right,
that would be amazing because it would suggest that there's
something on that planet capable of shooting particles at an
unnatural energy. Right before suggests trying to kill it was

(22:33):
like shooting deadly raise at us, Why do you got
to go there? Come on? It could be totally benign
alien particle physicists. And I'm sure those guys are really cool.
I'm sure they make awesome podcasts with alien cartoonists, right,
and maybe they're just doing their science and what we're
seeing is like the pollution from their enormous Solar system
sized collider or something they're doing to understand physics at

(22:56):
the most fundamental level. Um. That seems more are possible
to you then that they might be shooting at us
to kill us. Why would they try to shoot us
for so far away? What is the goal of beaming
you know, a crazy cosmic death ray all the way
across the universe? Or maybe do you think maybe they
could be talking to us, like, hey, like this is
morse code, like did for sure? For sure, it's a

(23:19):
good way to send a message, right, a type beam
of particles um and so we could certainly contain some information.
So that's one crazy ideas. Maybe it's pollution from an
alien particle physics experiment or a message from space or something.
That's definitely one idea. What are some other crazy ideas?
The least crazy idea is that maybe it's just some
new kind of star right, and we've never seen this
kind of star before and so we don't understand it.

(23:40):
And in some phase of its life it burps out
these particles at crazy high energy. But they're coming at
a pretty constant rate, aren't they. It would be some
sort of like big surprise if there was a sound
that was spewing these out at this rate. Yeah, it
would be. And because we have one more clue, which
is we know they can't be coming from very far
away because the universe, while it's transparent to me into

(24:02):
you into photons, they can Photons can fly through the
universe for billions and billions of light years. The universe
is opaque. Two particles at this energy, they can't fly
forever through the through the universe. They get slowed down
and stopped by the cosmic microwave background, these little leftover
photons from the Big Bang. They impede the progress of
these particles. I see. It's like, um, the universe is

(24:25):
thinker for these particles. So they can't travel this fast
that far exactly exactly. And so we're seeing them this fast.
That means they came from somewhere pretty close by. Now
we're talking close by by cosmic standards, right, not like oh,
they come from down the street, or they're coming from Neptune.
You know, we're talking it comes from this galaxy or
one of the nearby galaxies and a sort of our
local group. But they can't be coming from super duper

(24:47):
far away, right. It means that whatever it is can't
be too far, which means we should be able to
see it. Right, So if there is some new kind
of star out there that has this weird property, we
should be able to spot it. Okay, that's one. That's
another idea. Okay, that's the kind of the vanilla idea.
That's the vanilla board, crazy, vanilla crazy idea. I know.
I'm sure astrophysicists would love to discover a new kind

(25:09):
of star that purps out highendgy particles, but I think
it would be kind of boring because the other ideas
are crazy, like some of there's somebody out there who
wrote a paper and there's not a crackpot. This is
a guy from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,
right where Einstein famously worked and many smart people work today.
And he said that maybe um super high endry cosmic
rays are a clue that there's a glitch in the simulation.

(25:31):
What so that that's two things. One is that he's saying, Um,
the universe is a simulation, and too, there could be
gligen it. Yeah, exactly. And the idea is basically, if
the universe is a simulation, then probably whoever is running
that simulation has sliced the universe up into big cubes, right,
Because when you do a simulation of some piece of matter,

(25:53):
you slice it up into pieces and you do each
of them in parallel, and that works pretty well unless
you have something that's moving super duper fact asked so
that it crosses over those cubes like starts in one
ends up in the other one, which messes up your
calculation because the cube is supposed to contain everything, and
so things that are super duper fast could be traversing
these cubes and essentially creating glitches. And so he wrote

(26:15):
this really fun paper about how if we see discrepancies
in the angles that we discover these cosmic rays, that
that could be a clue that the universe is a simulation.
And he's found the glitch. Wow, And then what so?
Or the other possibility, right, is that it could be
something entirely new that we never discovered in the universe.
Maybe there's some kind of special, some some some something

(26:38):
that we've never seen before, right, yeah, exactly, and that
would be really fascinating. I think that would be amazing
to say, like, oh, there's a new kind of object.
It's not a star, it's not a black holes, nebula,
it's some new thing, something, something we can't even imagine
right now, exactly exactly. So what are scientists doing to

(27:01):
study these cosmic rays? Well, what we're doing is Richard
trying to collect as many of them as we can,
right because that's the number one clue is where they're
coming from and what is the energy spectrum? Like, so
if we could get enough of them, we could make
a map in the sky and say, oh, look they
tend to come from the centers of galaxies, or oh
look they tend to come from a nearby a black
hole or something. We could get a clue just by

(27:22):
seeing where they come from. Um. So the number one
thing is get as many of them as you can,
because right now we only have like, you know, a
handful of them. We have tens of these things at
the very highest energy, but I mean we're getting them
all the time. It's just a question of catching them
right and men being able to measure their angle under
energy exactly. And they're hitting the earth all the time,
but we're not spotting them right. It's like, you know,

(27:44):
if something amazing happens, you don't take a picture, well,
you don't have the picture right and say it didn't
happen pickure, didn't happen exactly. And so we have these
really awesome um cosmic ray telescopes. So these things are
really big, right, they cover huge amounts, Like there's one
in South America called the o G Observatory. It takes
up a huge swath of land in Argentina and um,

(28:07):
you know, thousands of square kilometers, so they get a
lot of a lot of stuff in there. But it's
not big enough, right, it's not big enough to collect
dozens and dozens of these things a year. So we're
building another one in Utah. It's called Telescope Array is
even bigger. It's awesome, but even still, you know, it's
a tiny fraction of the Earth. Because you can't cover
the whole Earth in particle detectors, right, people will get

(28:28):
kind of upset, you just like mowed down all the
farms and the cities and covered everything with particle detectors. Oh,
I see, these rays are so rare that you need
just to cover a lot of area. You can't just
sit in one one kilometer square and wait a hundred years.
You just have to have a big catcher's globe. Right. Yeah,
well you could wait a hundred years, but I don't
really want to. And your options are wait a long

(28:49):
time or build a bigger detector. And uh so we'd
like to know the answer sooner rather than later. But
these things are expensive, right, And by bigger you mean
not like there's a dish the size of them at
the Comma desert. It's like little dishes spread out, that's right.
Because what happens when a cosmic ray hits the atmosphere,
if you remember we talked about earlier, is it creates

(29:10):
a big splash. Right, One particle hits and it creates
two particles of lower energy, which turns into four particles
of even lower energy. So you start out with one
particle super high energy, and you end up with a
big flash over the surface of the Earth, lots of
particles with a little bit of energy. And that flash
is about two kilometers one to two kilometers wide, so
it creates this big shower over the surface of the Earth.

(29:32):
Um that's that tells you what that particle was and
where it came from, what its energy was. And you
don't have to see the whole shower. You just have
to have it hit a few detectors in order to
spot it. So you don't have to cover the whole
Earth with particle detectors. That doesn't have to be blanketed,
but you need like one every you know, or one
every kilometer or something. Right, So you're saying these are
really expensive, and the bigger they are, the more expensive

(29:54):
to get. But something interesting is that you are involved
in this sort of new way to the tet cosmic race, right,
like this kind of citizen science initiative. Yeah, my grad
students and I were sitting around a few years ago
and we thought, is there a better way to do this?
And we were all, you know, sitting around playing on
our phones than we realized, Hold on a second, this
phone I'm holding in my hand is kind of a

(30:15):
cosmic ray detector because every phone has a piece of
silicon inside of it that's used for the camera. Right,
cameras are no longer like film, their digital and digital
camera is basically a particle detector. There's a little bit
of silicon in there which is sensitive to cosmic rays,
and it has a computer in it, and it's connected
to the internet, right, and there are zillions of these

(30:38):
things all over the world. Right, So we imagine what
if when people went to sleep at night, we took
over their phones and we used the cameras in their
phones to look for particles. Because these things already exist
and people are maintaining them, and they don't use their
phones at night. And so we thought, let's try to
tie all the phones in the world together to make

(30:58):
a huge earth size telescope to gather as many of
these cosmic rays as we could, like a giant web
of mini portable detectors in people's phones. Yeah, exactly, because
the amount of money but that's been spent on phones
is staggering. I mean, there's like a million Android phones
turned on every single day. You know, It's like trillions

(31:19):
of dollars have been spent on consumer electronics. And we thought,
let's piggyback on that and use some of it for science,
because there's no way we're getting the government to build
us a trillion dollar particle detector. So and you guys
have made this, like, you made an app that you
can download to your phone to turn your phone into
a cosmic ray detector. That's right. It's called Crayface c

(31:39):
R A f I S stands for cosmic rays found
in smartphones. And you can go to you can Google
that and go to our website and you can download
the app and you can be a part of the network.
We're growing it slowly because we want to make sure
it works, but eventually it could be the largest particle
detector in the history of humanity. We could gather all
these cosmic rays and maybe even get a clue as

(32:00):
where they're coming from and who is sending us crazy messages.
You could be deciphering, helping decipher the alien message. That's right.
And the message could be We're coming for you. We
can't believe you killed stan Lee. Um. It could be
hey do you guys want superpowers? Or hey do you
have a cup of sugar? Um. So, so people at

(32:21):
home listening to this could be part of the scientific
Endebt endeavor. Right. That's pretty cool. Yeah, and we thought
that would be fun because we don't just want to
use your phones computing to do some calculation. We want
to actually let you be a part of it, and
the plan is that anybody who lets their phone run
for long enough and collects enough data can actually be
an author on the scientific papers that come out of it,
if we ever got to do any science of it,

(32:43):
because we want people to feel invested, We want people
to feel like they really get to participate in this project.
So what you're saying is that with these cosmic rays,
really what we need is just more data, Like we
don't know where they could be coming from, but we
don't have no enough about them to try to decipher
it right exactly. It's like we've gotten the first taste
of a clue that something interesting is out there, and

(33:04):
we need the rest of the clues before we can
figure it out because we just don't have enough information. Right.
We've seen a few of them, but we'd love to
see thousands and millions of them before we have an
idea of where they're coming from, what's causing them. We
just need more data. So this is such a fascinating
thing to me, just the sense, just the idea that
there might be something in the universe out there that

(33:25):
we still don't know. You know, it's like certain, Yeah,
I'm certain. I mean even a cognate craze aside. The
universe is filled with crazy stuff, and every decade we
discovered new crazier stuff than we could have even ever imagined.
So this is fantastic because you're right, it's a concrete clue.
It's the universe giving us the direction is weird look
to find new crazy stuff. But I'm sure already that

(33:46):
there's crazy stuff in the universe we never imagined. Yeah,
and we're being bathed in it, right, like we're constantly
getting being bombarded by these clues that there's that there's
mystery that's right in the universe is sending us these messages,
and it's wondering why are these eyes taken so long
to figure it out? We're right here, that's right. Yeah,
So cosmic rays, these super high your cosmic grades of

(34:07):
the mysteries for decades. We've known about these things for
decades and we just haven't figured it out yet. Alright,
So thanks everyone for listening to the mystery of cosmic rays.
So when you look up at the night sky the
next time, or even if you walk out during the day.
Just remember that you're being bathed in physics mystery. That's right,

(34:28):
And if you do figure out the mystery of cosmic rays,
please let us know. Give us a tip before you
announce the publicy. I'd love to be included before you
still have a question after listening to all these explanations,
please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you.

(34:50):
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Feedback at Daniel and Orge dot com.