A cosmic ray detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has just been installed on the International Space Station. Cosmic rays are really cool even though most people don’t have a clue what they are. What are they? They are basically extremely high energy particles that have been accelerated to very high energies through interactions somewhere in the universe. They are therefore not like light-rays or radio-waves. They are actual particles of matter, usually protons and neutrons or electrons, sometimes antimatter particles.
We humans cannot experience them directly. If we could, we would see them all over. They are streaming in on us all the time. On rare occasions there have been detections of extremely high energy cosmic rays, to the point that it shocked physicists. Some of these can have energy that is 50 million times higher than the particles getting accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider.
I still wonder why that thing was built, given that there exists an abundance of highly accelerated particles for us to observe.
Cosmic rays are a reminder that we live in a world of radiation. They are a severe hazard to people traveling in space.
They also can pose a severe threat to electronics systems and may have been responsible for at least one aircraft malfunction which caused numerous injuries when a craft’s systems experienced an unknown spike and tried to compensate.
According to Wikipedia “Studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month.”
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