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Set high on a mountain plain in China, an ambitious observatory will offer a unique perspective on the origins of cosmic rays, high-energy particles that rain down on Earth. Construction has started on the project, which will probe, for the first time, ultra-high-energy γ-rays — bursts of radiation thought to be produced alongside cosmic rays in our Galaxy, but whose origins are easier to track.
The 1.3-square-kilometre site near Daocheng in Sichuan, close to Tibet, received the go-ahead in January, after an environmental report convinced the government that construction would not harm the threatened white-lipped deer (Cervus albirostris) and other animals in a nearby nature reserve. Now, contractors are installing infrastructure for the 1.2-billion-yuan (US$174-million) Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO).
"This will be the leading project to clarify questions of cosmic-ray physics," says Giuseppe Di Sciascio, a particle physicist at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Rome. Di Sciascio, along with researchers from a number of countries, including Switzerland, Russia and Thailand, hopes to collaborate on the project. Chief among the physics questions that LHAASO will investigate is what accelerates cosmic rays — charged particles such as protons or atomic nuclei — to such high energies. Some cosmic rays that hit Earth have energies millions of times greater than the energies produced by the most powerful human-made particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists have proposed certain celestial phenomena, such as black holes or supernovae, as origins, but no one has confirmed this conclusively.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 17 2017, @02:21PM (1 child)
The origins of the highest energy cosmic rays has been a major mystery for decades, really ever since they were observed. There are not a lot of known energy sources to get particles moving with the momentum that these have, and it is expected that these sources (various flavors of supernovae, active galactic nuclei, etc.) are generating particles with these energies. The problem comes with the environment in which these particles travel. Like all things moving, the mover sees Doppler effects. These particles are moving so fast that the normally invisible (to them) blackbody radiation gets blue-shifted up to where it looks like a crap ton of x-rays, gamma rays, etc. It is hard for particles with these energies to travel very far because they lose energy quickly as they run into all this opposing high-energy radiation. This suggests that the origins of the really high energy cosmic rays have to be relatively close to us; however, the most energetic processes we know are located very far away from us. WTF?
This new cosmic ray observatory is being built to try to get an idea of what is inside that WTF.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 18 2017, @04:46AM
Different anon here, will add that there are many cosmic-ray projects in progress around the world.