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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) by khallow on Saturday March 18 2017, @04:51AM
Because people who control that amount of cash love to invest in worthless shit to prove they can waste taxpayer money unaccountably.
Not feeling it here. Just because politicians, financiers, etc squander lots of other peoples' money on worthless shit, doesn't mean that they do it because they have some need to prove that they can waste the money unaccountably. The most common cause is simple conflict of interest.
This reminds me of a previous grandiose project reported on SN, where someone announced that they were ready to invest two billions on something, which our local armchair scientists/investors quickly deemed completely absurd.
Here's my view. I may well have been one of those naysayers. But if it's their money, I ultimately don't have a problem with how they spend it as long as they aren't harming people by spending that money (eg, paying terrorists/thugs to kill people, etc). But if that money actually came from other people, such as public funding, then I'm usually outright against the expenditure.
My view is that a lot of this spending doesn't take courage or foresight. It takes skimming a portion off the top. Or it's buying votes. Or it's stroking some politicians' egos.