Hearing the phrase “cosmic rays,” one may wow at the ideas that provokes.
As it should, perhaps.
After all, they “interact with our atmosphere, where they produce a cascade of secondary particles.”
Yes, that may be getting into pretty heady stuff, but Greg Furlich was at Great Basin National Park Sept. 8 to talk about that and more. Furlich and his team run the largest cosmic ray observatory in the Northern Hemisphere – an observatory that is in Millard County, near Delta.
As Furlich also explained in his presentation “Dark Nights & Desert Air: Understanding the Highest-Energy Particles from the Universe,” the observatory is called the Telescope Array Project.
‘Dark Nights & Desert Air’
There are “ultra high-energy cosmic rays” having the same energy equivalence as “a baseball pitch,” said Furlich, who visits the observatory three to four days per month.
Then touching on the history of cosmic ray observations, Furlich said that Victor Hess, doing a hot air balloon experiment, discovered “cosmic radiation.” For that, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936. And Pierre Auger discovered a cosmic ray “air shower” after noticing coincidental events over distances.
“They were probably not caused by a single particle,” Furlich said later.
The first detection arrays were at Volcano Ranch from 1959 to 1978 and Fly’s Eye from 1981 to 1993, Furlich said.
The work Furlich does is possible because of their discoveries, Furlich agreed.
Furlich, with undergraduate assistants Mark Hayward and Zane Gerber (with advisor Douglas Bergman), is looking for the Cosmic Ray Extensive Air Shower.
“We cannot detect that initial cosmic ray because it’s a particle floating around the universe,” Furlich later said. He remarked that a cascade of parties “indicates a cosmic ray,” and at least the initial cosmic ray what Furlich and his team is trying to detect (the ray cannot be detected directly). That’s done through their surface detectors. It’s possible knowing that when solar particles interact with the Earth’s magnetic field, they will usually spiral into Earth’s magnetic poles, where they excite the gas in the atmosphere, causing it to glow. (Furlich showed an example of this Sept. 8, when he showed green glow on a rock detected by a device called a photomultiplier tube, and said that is where quartz on the rock was fluorescing.)
Furlich then got into “big questions of the field”: “What nuclei are cosmic rays made of: protons or iron?” “Where are cosmic rays coming from?” “What energetic processes are accelerating these particles to high levels of energy?”
Then Furlich spoke to the Delta observatory, saying that he and his team like to call the surface detectors “hospital beds” because of their appearance. As Furlich and his team are also utilizing florescence detectors, they are doing “hybrid detection,” he said. The observatory first observed light 10 years ago.
While speaking on the observatory’s florescence detector site, Furlich said that while “most telescopes look outside the atmosphere,” “(the Delta) telescopes look at the atmosphere.”
Furlich added that the observatory will be quadrupling in size and that beryllium, a rare element by comparison in the universe, is the main ingredient for the mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to replace the Hubble Space Telescope and launch in March 2021.
Furlich also touched on the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory, the biggest cosmic observatory in the Southern Hemisphere. Near highlands in western Argentina, it has a climate similar to Millard County’s, Furlich said.
“We want that dry desert air because the air is clear; the air doesn’t have much humidity,” Furlich told the Millard County Chronicle Progress. “It makes it very ideal in that situation to detect cosmic rays.”
Furlich then spoke to “the exciting possibility of where cosmic rays are coming from.” He then touched on “energetic processes” like “supernova remnants,” “starburst galaxies,” “active galactic nuclei” and “neutron star mergers.”
“The universe in light” was Furlich’s next topic, referencing a satellite from a European Space Agency observatory, cosmic microwave background radiation and “all-sky map.”
“The all-sky maps do make pretty maps,” Furlich said. “You can produce those all-sky maps in very different ways.”
The options for placing cosmic ray detectors are relatively vast since since the “last place” for installing one is space, Furlich said, remarking that it would be “cool” to see a cosmic ray detector go onto the International Space Station as the Hubble Space Telescope went into space.
Furlich also spoke about how he and his team are using stars to know where they are looking, not unlike how sailors would use stars to know where they are going.
He also said that he runs the detectors when there are not stars in view.
An audience member asked what benefits the research provides.
The results of the research may provide “something we have never seen before,” Furlich said.
“Why not take (particles) we get for free and understand those particles?” he asked.
“If a cosmic ray hit my wife, what will happen?” another audience member asked.
It would “dissipate” into the “immediate” surrounding cells in your body, though that means that she could evolve, Furlich said.
The project does not have anyone who can let anyone into the Watson Cosmic Ray Center, which is part of the observatory, Furlich said. However, Furlich or the the project manager, John Matthews, are happy to arrange tours. They can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., respectively.
The project is a million-dollar-per-year collaboration, with costs of about a million dollars per year, between the University of Utah, Utah State University and the University of Denver; Japanese and South Korean institutions; and one from Belgium and Russia each. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and “various funding agencies throughout the world,” Furlich said.
Rhett Wilkinson
Staff Reporter