This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every second, particles zip through your body at nearly the speed of light. They rain down from a storm high in the sky, where cosmic rays, a powerful type of interstellar matter, constantly strike atoms in Earth's atmosphere.
The impacts break them apart into a shower of particles that rain to the ground. Scientists have studied these cosmic rainstorms for more than a century, but they lack a precise understanding of how they form. Many researchers are searching for a clearer picture, and they don't even need to look to the sky to study them.
Instead, they can use a particle collider: CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. With a team of particle physicists, I study how these cosmic rainstorms are born. We used the world's first laboratory collisions of oxygen atoms with protons to simulate cosmic rays in the lab.
Our results have now been published in Physical Review Letters. In the early 20th century, physicist Victor Hess discovered cosmic rays in hot-air balloons. As he ascended several kilometers, his instruments found that radiation levels kept rising unexpectedly.
He deduced that these rays must come from space and received the 1936 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery. The surprises did not stop there. Experiments later found that this cosmic radiation harbored new kinds of matter called antimatter.
These new kinds of matter included muons, pions and kaons. These particles are similar to the electrons, protons and neutrons inside atoms, but they exist fleetingly and are harder to see. These building blocks of matter helped fill out the modern theory of particle physics.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
