Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Are Cosmic Rays?

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

Who or what is shooting crazy high energy particles at us? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. The universe is chalk 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 made by aliens.

I mean, And there's, you're always finding things that don't make any sense. Now usually the procedure is, you know, you see something you don't understand, and then you try to explain it using things you do understand. 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. It's truth is out there.

The truth is out there. It's whispering to us, there's 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 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, 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 try 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, the ones that are clues as to the next revolution in physics, the ones that I hope will lead to a Nobel Prize discovery, hopefully by me or my graduate students. Or not. Or lead to years of frustration and nothing. That's research.

Or you are listener. And hey, if you get a Nobel Prize winning idea listening to this podcast, at least give us a little bit of credit. Yeah, give us a shout out at least when you go to Stockholm, you know, a nod and a winner. We'll understand you're talking about us. Yeah, just say our website, and then we'll be, we'll call it even. But, you know, that's a joke, but it is true that we're going to be talking today about a topic which, if somebody could explain it, it would almost certainly give them a Nobel Prize. Anytime you can explain a decades-long standing mystery in physics, you know, that's worth something. That's right.

Today on the podcast, we'll be talking about cosmic rays. And not just any cosmic rays, super-duper crazy high-energy cosmic rays. Is that the official physics name for them? Yeah, what is the acronym for that? Super-duper, crazy high, and such a bajikori curse. Yes, we say that in conferences all the time. That's right. You should add some numbers to that, though, at the end, like three.

Sub-jib-D-D-3 cosmic rays. Yeah, no, but we run out of prefixes to even describe the high energy of particles that we see. from space. Okay, yeah, yeah. 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 some comics by Stan Lee, the late great Stan Lee. I don't know if you know this, but the Fantastic Four, their origin, is tied to this idea of cosmic rays. There is so much overlap between physics and cartoons. right? I mean, not just this podcast, but like so much of concepts in physics ends up in cartoons, you know, radiation, cosmic rays, all this stuff. It's just like, it's fuel for people's imagination. Yeah. No, I think they, I mean, comics in general have always sort of tried to capture the public anxiety and the public kind of zeitgeist and to kind of put into the stories. You're saying cartoonists have been making physicists look bad for decades.

No, I'd be making you look cool like superheroes. I can just imagine you in Spandex, Daniel. Oh, wait, I'd rather not. I'm out. Mike dropped. So, yeah, in the Fantastic Four, 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 get them going visible and turn into a flaming torch. So that's how I know about cosmic rays. Is that about correct, you know? Do they give you superpowers? I finally get to ask a physicist. I totally recommend you go into space and bathe yourself in Cosmic Rays. You will definitely get superpowers.

That's 100% accurate. I love how cartoons and comic books especially have been like using concepts in physics that are like weekly understood. And then making us look like bad guys, right? All these. It's always like this new technology is going to cause the rise of a crazy villain or, you know, creation, cosmic rays, 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? No, I think if you bathe yourself in cosmic rays, you're very likely to die.

So please, listeners, 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 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. What is a cosmic ray? Do you know what a cosmic ray is?

Here's what they had to say. 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 pummeling 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, so maybe cosmic surfers. A ray 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 100% sure. Yes, I would guess it has to do with solar rays, a sun, and something related to that. Okay, yep. Cosmic rays, they power Superman. It'd be funny if your wife was like, wait, how do you know about Ray? She's like, he wasn't here last night. I don't know what you're talking about. But he is cosmic.

Oh, no. This podcast just got not safe for work once again. This is what happens when we record at night, Jorge, I tell you. It's a little wonky. It's a little wonky. It's a DJEU late night. After dark. But most people seem to have heard about cosmic rays,

and one fellow even said, oh, yeah, they power Superman. So there's definitely the cosmic ray physics cartooning connection there. Okay, they power super rays. Come on, who is this person? Everyone knows that's not right. That is so wrong. Not everybody knows that. So where does Superman get his power?

Does he eat? Does Superman actually eat? Have you seen Superman eat? The Superman? No, he doesn't need to eat. He gets energy from the sun. The sun, so those are cosmic rays, Jorge. What?

He gets energy for cosmic rays. Okay, 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 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? Did we confuse rays and particles before? Oh, yeah. You know, we knew about things like x-rays

and all sorts of other kinds of rays before we understood particles. And so, yeah, cosmic rays have been known about for, you know, 100 years or so. Oh, we didn't know they were like little bits. Yeah, it's more recently that people understood there were particles. But, you know, everything that's a particle from space

officially could be called a cosmic ray. And that includes photons from the sun. Wait, photons? Random dude on the street knows more about Superman than you do. I think they know more about physics than I do, clearly. But I doubt they know more about Superman. That person should do this podcast, right? They know more physics and no more cosmic, no more co-toeing.

So, boom, that qualifies them to take over. Okay, so it just means any kind of energy or particle that's coming from 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 rays. You can. It wouldn't be very exciting. You're right.

But the cosmic rays that we're interested in are not the normal, everyday, beam of sunlight that comes from the sun, right? The cosmic rays we're 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 of stuff.

The sun is spewing stuff out. It's called the solar wind. I mean, 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. Wow. So that might be an interesting, a 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, absolutely. Because it's, you know, it's a huge fusion reactor. And fusion produces a lot of stuff. Uh-huh. Yeah. So you get protons, you get heavier elements. You get huge numbers of neutrinos.

I mean, we have a hundred billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your fingernail every second. Wow. So there's a lot of stuff coming from the sun. Okay, but neutrinos we don't feel and they go right through us, right? They're known as the ghost particle. That's right. Okay. So the reason we're not all constantly getting superpowers from cosmic rays from the sun is that most of this stuff is shielded for most of this stuff.

So photons, not dangerous. Neutrinos pass right through us. They can't affect us at all, right? And for those of you interested in neutrinos, we have a whole podcast on that. And then the other stuff, the stuff that's more dangerous, are charged. particles like protons or heavier nuclei, that could really do some damage. Yeah, these are more dangerous because they're in a way

bigger and more, they interact with our cells in a very dangerous way, right? That's right, yeah. If a proton shot through you, it would definitely interact with things in you. It could disturb your DNA, it could give you cancer. It's not a good idea to stand in a 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, you already have a shelter and that shelter 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 short break. Imagine that you're on an airplane and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency and we need someone, anyone, to land Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it my eyes close.

I'm Manny. I'm Noah. This is Devon. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize. Recognize that they lack expertise.

And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick.

I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very, you're saying things you're battling and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month,

so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere.

Now it's a personal mission. I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, sis, what if I could promise you you never had to listen to a condescending finance, bro,

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looking for some online lenders because they tend to have fewer fees and be more affordable. Listen, I am not here to judge. It is so expensive in these streets. I 100% can see how in just a few months, months, you can have this much credit card debt and it weighs on you. It's really easy to just like stick your head in the sand. It's nice and dark in the sand. Even if it's scary, it's not going to go away just because you're avoiding it.

And in fact, it may get even worse. For more judgment-free money advice, listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. stuff at is and it's coming all the way to Earth. So how does the magnetic field protect us? Well, every charged particle that hits a 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. And sometimes they spiral along and end up at the North Pole and that's why you get the northern lights. You mean the planet Earth has a force field? Yes. We have a force field. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's a good thing we do it because otherwise we'd all have cancer. Wow. So we have a massive global anti-cancer shield. Wow. Okay, that's pretty cool. Pretty impressive stuff. Yeah, like a force field for real. But you said also the atmosphere protects us. That's right, because a particle that makes it through the magnetic field and hits the atmosphere 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, oxygen, and get down to Earth, right?

Get down to the surface. But a charged particle will slam into those things and will interact with them. It'll break up those nuclei. It's sort of 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 just burn up, and that's what we see as 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 with the air and the oxygen in our atmosphere before it gets to us. Yeah, and you can think of the atmosphere sort of 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 of like in billiards when you start with 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 cue ball, right? But if you get hit by the seven, then, you know, you're not going to be, you're going to be an okay shape. Okay. But it's surprising because the atmosphere is pretty thin, isn't it? Kind of in comparison to the Earth and to the sun. It's like a thin layer of gas. But that you're saying that's really... Are you feeling naked?

Are you feeling naked when it comes to space now? You're like suddenly feeling vulnerable. Oh, my God, I need to put something else on. I feel cosmically naked. Yeah, the Earth's atmosphere. is, you know, it depends on where you want to call the edge of the atmosphere, but it's not super thick compared to 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 could be protecting us, you know? 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, the solar wind would blow away our atmosphere. Oh, so the magnetic field is doing two things. It's being a cool force field, and it's kind of also protecting our sunblock, basically.

Exactly, exactly. You can think of the atmosphere as like the insulation, and the magnetic field is like the aluminum sheeting on the outside of your house that keeps the cold, cold, uncaring space away, and let's us hang out and relax safely on the surface of the Earth. So then a cosmic rays 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 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 as you look, you just keep finding them at higher and higher energy.

and the energy they get to is ridiculous. We see cosmic 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 at the lower energies of these protons hitting to Earth, what are the energies of these cosmic rays?

So we usually use a unit called electron volt, and it's sort of a unit we use in particle physics. I'll break it down for you in a minute. But, you know, at the lower energies like 10 to the 11 electron volts, 10 to the 12 electron volts, these are very common, no big deal put out by the sun. The things start to get interesting around 10 to the 18, 10 to the 19, 10 to the 20. We even see particles around 10 to the 21 electron volts. So for those of you who aren't familiar with that unit, 10 to the 21 electron bolts is like more than 100 joules, which is as much energy is in a major league fastball. Wow.

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 a human can throw it. Which would hurt if it hit you, right? It certainly would. It would fly right through you and cause all sorts of damage. But you probably wouldn't notice it immediately. So if you had to choose between getting hit by a cosmic ray, super high energy cosmic ray or a major league fastball in the head, I'd probably choose a cosmic ray, honestly.

Because it's tiny and it might not do that much. damage as it slams into you is that right yeah yeah it's just one and you might get lucky it might 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 wait by energy do you mean like the particle itself has a lot of energy or it's just going faster yeah that's the same thing i mean the particle has 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 really just trucking along at a super high speed. Oh, I see. So the sun is exploding. It 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 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. Because 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? we get them from like the back from like the night side

we get them yeah we get them we're getting shot out from the back directions in space we're getting shot out from some place in the universe we don't even know right oh I see so wait so cosmic rays aren't just all coming from the sun some of them we're getting bombarded by rays from all directions you're saying that's right

lots of things in space make cosmic rays our sun other suns black holes pulsars all those crazy things they all shoot out particles and some of them come to earth Any kind of violent kind of, you know, explosion continues crashing in the universe is spewing out stuff. That's right. It's making cosmic rays. And some of them land on Earth. And they're a clue, right? They're clues to what happened. What made this neutrino? 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 about how and where it was born. And that's fascinating because it tells us about places we'll never get to and things we'll 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? Yeah, the higher the energy, the more rare they are. So, for example, at 10 to the 21 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 kilometer, 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 would have to wait a long time to observe them. But if you have a big detector, 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 a one kilometer square around you, you'll have to wait 100 years to see one of these high energy particles come down on you. That's right, exactly. And to me, the most interesting thing about these particles is that we have no idea what could be making them. I mean, I've asked astrophysicists, I've said, what's the highest energy particle you imagine in space anywhere in the universe, use anything you want? They start with like a supernova, huge explosion, particles going super fast. Then they slingshot the stuff around a black hole, right?

Then they ride waves from other stars, and they can't get close to the kind of particles we see. they at most can explain particles at like 10 to the 17 10 to the 18 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 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 would be weird 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. So that's a clue that there's something out there waiting to be discovered. These are clues that are surfing along in the cosmos being delivered to Earth and saying, there's something interesting, pay attention. Wow. So that's a huge mystery. But I'm sure physicists have ideas. Like what could these crazy high energy particles be or be coming from?

I think it's a fantastic four. I think it's a form of vengeance. It's Stan Lee shooting these particles from heaven. Yeah, exactly. And I want to talk about that some more, but first, let's take a quick break. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers. The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane.

Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this, pull that, turn this. It's just, I can do it my eyes close. I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing, we get to the bottom of questions like these.

Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize that they lack expertise. And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to No Such Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I had this overwhelming sensation that I had to call it right then.

And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month,

so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran, and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place, and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission.

I don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission. I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has been fabricated.

Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness, the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, we continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories.

I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. We're Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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. these things ever seen and they don't like all come from the sun or from one point in space. But we do have some fun ideas, you know, and one of my favorites, of course, is maybe it's not something that's shooting these cosmic rays at us. Maybe it's some one, right? I mean, imagine

if we found all these cosmic rays and we got more of them somehow and we could tell that 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 some thing on that planet capable of shooting particles at an unnatural energy, right? It could be aliens trying to kill us, like shooting deadly rays 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 the most fundamental level. That seems more plausible to you than that they might be shooting at

is to kill us. Why would they try to shoot us for so far away? What is the goal of beaming a crazy cosmic death ray all the way across the universe? Do you think maybe they could be talking to us?

Like, hey, this is Morse code. For sure. For sure. It's a good way to send a message, right? A tight beam of particles. And so it could certainly contain some information.

So that's one crazy idea. 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.

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 sun 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 and to you and to photons, photons can fly through the universe for billions and billions of light years, the universe is opaque to particles at this energy. They can't fly forever 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. Oh, I see. It's like the universe is thicker 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 cosmic standards, right? It's 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 of sort of our local group. But they can't be coming from super-duper far away, right? It means that whatever it is can't be too far, which means we should be able to see it. 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. Wow. That's another idea. Okay, that's the kind of the vanilla idea. That's the vanilla boring idea. The crazy vanilla idea. I know. I'm sure astrophysists would love to discover a new kind of star that burps out high energy particles, but I think it would be

kind of boring because the other ideas are crazy. Like, 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 super high-energy cosmic rays are a clue that there's a glitch in the simulation. What? So that's two things.

One is that he's saying the universe is a simulation, and two, there could be a glitch in it. Yeah, exactly. And the idea is basically, if the universe is a simulation, then probably whoever's running that simulation has sliced the universe up into B. big cubes, right? Because when you do a simulation of some piece of matter, 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 fast so that it crosses over those cubes. It like starts in one and 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 this really fun paper about how if we see discrepancies in the angles that we discover these cosmic rays at, that can be a clue that the universe is a simulation

and he's found the glitch. Wow. And then so, or the other possibility, right, is that it could be something entirely new that we've never discovered in the universe. Maybe there's some kind of special, something 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 hole, It's not a nebula. It's some new thing. Something we can't even imagine right now. Exactly. Exactly. So what are scientists doing to study these cosmic rays?

Well, what we're doing is we're just trying to collect as many of them as we can, right? Because that's the number one clue is where are they 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 galaxy. or, oh, look, they tend to come from a nearby a black hole or something. We could get a clue just by seeing where they come from. 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 being able to measure their angle and their energy. Exactly. And they're hitting the earth all the time, but we're not spotting them, right? It's like, you know, if something amazing happens, you don't take a picture, Well, you don't have the picture, right?

Picker it didn't happen. Picker it didn't happen, exactly. And so we have these really awesome cosmic ray telescopes. So these things are really big, right? They cover huge amounts. Like there's one in South America called the Oje Observatory. It takes up a huge swath of land in Argentina. And, you know, it's thousands of square kilometers.

So they get 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. It's even bigger. It's awesome. But even still, it's a tiny fraction of the earth.

Because you can't cover the whole earth in particle detectors, right? People would get kind of upset if 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 kilometer square and wait 100 years. You just have to have a big catcher's glow, right? Yeah. Well, you could wait a lot.

100 years, but I don't really want to. Your options are wait a long time or build a bigger detector. 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 the comma desert.

It's like little dishes spread out. That's right. Because what happens when a cosmic array hits the atmosphere, if you remember we talked about earlier, is it creates a big splash, right? One particle hits and 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 that tells you what that particle was and where it came from and 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. It doesn't have to be blanketed, but you need one every, you know, 500 meters or one every kilometer or something. Right. So you're saying these are really expensive and the bigger they are, the more expensive they get. But something interesting is that you are involved in this sort

of new way to detect 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. Then we realized, hold on a second. This phone I'm holding in my hand is kind of a 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, they're 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 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 a huge, earth-sized 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

that's been spent on phones, is staggering. I mean, there's like a million Android phones turned on every single day. And it's like trillions of dollars have been spent on consumer electronics. So we thought, let's piggyback on that and use some of it for science

because it's no way we're getting the government to build us a trillion dollar particle detector. 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 C-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 to where they're coming from and who is sending us crazy messages.

Yeah. 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. It could be, hey, do you guys want superpowers? Or, hey, do you have a cup of sugar? So people at home listening to this could be part of the scientific 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. out of it if we ever got to do any science of it. 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 know 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 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. love to see thousands and millions of them before we have an idea of where they're coming from and what's causing them. We just need more data. So this is such a fascinating thing to me, just the idea that there might be something in the universe out there

that we still don't know. You know, it's like knowing... I'm certain. Yeah. I'm certain. I mean, even cosmic rays aside, the universe is filled with crazy stuff and every decade we discover new crazier stuff than we could have even ever imagined. So this is fantastic

because you're right, it's a concrete clue. the universe giving us the direction is where to look to find new crazy stuff but I'm sure already that there's crazy stuff in the universe we never imagined and we're being bathed in it right like we're constantly getting being bombarded by these clues

that there's mystery that's right the universe is sending us these messages and it's wondering why are these guys taken so long to figure it out we're right here that's right yeah so cosmic rays these super high energy cosmic rays have been mysteries for decades

we've known about these things for decades and we just haven't figured it out yet. All right, so thanks everyone for listening to the mystery of cosmic rays. Yeah. 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.

And if you do figure out the mystery of cosmic rays, please let us know. Give us a tip before you announce it publicly. I'd love to be clued in. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. rules so confusing. You got a hood of you. I'll take it all!

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