What Are Cosmic Rays?

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Speaker 1: The universe is chuck 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 but made by aliens. I mean, there's all You're always finding things that don't make any sense. 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, and 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. Its 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're trying 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, those that are clues as to the next revolution in physics, the that I hope will lead to a Nobel Prize discovery hopefully by me or my graduate students or not, or year leads to years of frustration and nothing. That's that's research. Or you are a listener, and hey, if you get a Nobel Prize winning idea listening to this podcast, at least give us a little bit of credit. Yes, give us a shout out. At least when you go to Stockholm, you know, nod in a wink. We'll we'll understand you're talking about us. Yeah, just say our our website and then we'll be we'll call it. We'll call it even. But you know that's a joke, but it is true that we're gonna be talking today about a topic which, if somebody could explain it would almost certainly give them a Nobel prize. Anytime you can explain a decades long standing mystery in physics, you know, that's that's worth something. That's right Today on the podcast, we'll be talking about cosmic raise, and not just any cosmic raise, super duper crazy high energy cosmic raise. Is that the official physics for them? Yeah? What is the acronym for that super duper crazy high such as saying that in conferences all the time. That's right, you can you should add some numbers to that though at the end, like three three cosmic rays. Yeah no, but we run out of we run out of prephysics prefixist to even described as a 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, uh, some comics by Stanley, the late Great Stanley. I don't know if you know this, but the Fantastic Four, their origin is tied to this idea of cosmic rays. There's so much overlap between physics and cartoons, right, I mean not just this podcast, but like so much of concepts and physics ends up in cartoons. You know, ray, Asian, cosmic rays, all this stuff. It's just like it's fuel for people's imagination. Yeah, no, I think I think they mean comics in general have always sort of tried to capture the public anxiety and and the public kind of zeitgeist, and to kind of put in saying, cartoonists have been making physicists look bad for I've been making you look cool like superheroes. I can just imagine you, imagine you in spandex. Daniel, Oh wait, Hard rather not um come out? Mike dropped. So yeah. And the Fantastic Four, the 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 getting going visible and turning to a flaming torch. So that's how I know about the cosmic rays. Is that about correct? You know? Do they give you superpowers? I finally totally get I totally recommend you go into into space and bade yourself in consmic race. You'll definitely get super ours. That's accurate. Um. I love how cartoons and comic books especially have been like using concepts in physics that are like weakly 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, but to be honest, in cosmic ray is 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? Um? No, I think if you bathe yourself in cosmic grads, you're very likely to die. Sons 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 and 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 at what is a cosmic ray? Do you know what a cosmic ray is Here's what they had to say. Um, 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 pumbling 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 array 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 sure. Yes, I would guess it has to do a solar raise the sun and something related to that. Okay, cosmic raise, they power Superman be funny of your wife was like, wait, how do you know about Ray? She's like, he wasn't here last night. I don't know if you're talking about, but he is cosmic. This podcast just got not safe for work once again. This is what happens when we record at night. Why I tell you it's a little wonky. It's a d j U late night after dark. But most people seem to have heard about cosmic craze, and one fellow even said, oh, yeah, they power Superman. So there's definitely the cosmic grave physics cartooning connection there. Okay, they power Superman? Come on, who is this person? Everyone knows? That's not right? Not everybody knows that. So where's Superman get his power? Does he eat? Does Superman actually eat? Have you seen Superman eat? Um? Superman? No, he doesn't know. He doesn't need to eat. He gets energy from the Sun. The Sun says, those are cosmic rays. Jorge, what? 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? Like did we confuse raisin particles before? Oh? Yeah, um, you know, we knew about things like X rays and all sorts of other kinds of rays before we understood particles. So yeah, cosmic rays have been have been known about for you know, a hundred years, so we didn't know they were like little bits. Yeah, it's only it's more recently that people understood their particles. But you know, everything that's a particle from space officially could be called the cosmic ray, and that includes photons from the sun. Random dude on the streets, know it's more about Superman than you do. I think they know more about physics than I do, clearly, but I doubt they know more about that person. You should do this. They know more physics and no more cosmics, no more continent boom that qualifies them to take over. Okay, So it just means any kind of energy or particle that's coming front 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 grades. 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 speam of sunlight that comes from the sun right into cosmic grades were 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. And 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 loud. So so that's that might be an interesting and 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, I asolutely, because it's you know, it's a huge fusion reactor, and fusion produces a lot of stuff. Yeah, So you get protons, you get heavier elements, you get huge numbers of neutrinos. I mean, we have um a hundred billion neutrinos from the Sun passed through your fingernail every second. 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 there. Like that, they're known as ghost particle. That's right. So the reason we're not all constantly getting superpowers from cosmic grades from the Sun is that most of this stuff is we're shielded from most of this stuff. So photons not dangerous neutrinos pass right through us. We haven't. They can't affect us at all. Right, And for those of you interested 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, heavier nuclei that could really do some damage. These are more dangerous because they're they're in a way bigger and more. They interact with our cells in a very dangerous way, right, that's right. Yeah, if you if a protons 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 the 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, um, you already have a shelter, and that shelter is the 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. Okay, So the Sun is shooting stuff at us, and it's coming all the way to Earth. So how does the magnetic field protect us? Well, every charged particle that hits the 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 it and sometimes they spiral along and end up at the North Pole. And that's what you that's why you get the Northern lights. You mean the planet Earth has a force field. Yes, we have a force field. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, And it's a good thing we do because otherwise we don't have cancer. So we have a massive global anti cancer shield. Wow. Okay, that's pretty crazy impressive stuff like a force like a force field for for real. 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 and oxygen and and get down to Earth right, get down to the surface. But a charge particle will slam into those things and will interact with them. They'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 do burn up. And that's what we call it's what we see is 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 so 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 an billiards when you start with a like 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 Cuba, all right. If you get hit by the seven, then you know you're not gonna be You're gonna be an okay shape. Okay. But 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 us. But that you're saying that feeling naked, feeling naked when when it comes to space now suddenly feeling vulnerable. Oh my god, I need to put something else on. I feel cosmicly. Yeah, the other Earth's atmospheres, you know, um uh, 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 would could be protecting us, you know, it's um 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. So the so the magnetic field is doing two things. It's being a cool force field and it's kind of also protecting our sun block. Basically exactly exactly, you can think of the atmospheres like the insulation, and the magnetic field is like the you know, the aluminum sheeting on the outside of your house that keeps the cold, cold, uncarrying space away, and let's just hang out and relax safely on the surface of the Earth. So then a cosmic race 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 you and as you look, you just keep finding them at higher and higher energy and the energy they get to is ridiculous. Like 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, um, at the lower energies of these protons hitting the Earth, what are the energies of these cosmic rays? So we usually use a unit called electron volt and um it's a sort of a unit using particle physics. I'll break it down for you in a minute. But you know, at the lower energies like ten to the eleven electron volts, tend to the twelve electron volts, These are very common, no big deal put out by the Sun. But things start to get interesting around tend to the eighteen ten, the nineteen ten to the twenty. We even see particles around ten to the twenty one electron volts. So, for those of you who aren't familiar with that unit, ten to the twenty one electron bolts is like more than a hundred jewels, which is as much energy is in a major league fastball. 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 fast as a human can throw it, which would hurt if it hit you right, It certainly would. It certainly would. It would fly right through you and cause all sorts of damage. You probably wouldn't notice it immediately. So if you had to choose between getting hit by a cosmic ray super hi energy cosmo gray, or a major league fastball in the head, I'd probably choose cosmic gray, honestly, because it's tiny and it might not do that much damage as it slams into Is that right. Yeah, yeah, it's just one, and you might get lucky. You 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 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 is 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 just it's it's really just trucking along at a super high speed. Oh I see. So the Sun is exploding, it's 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. 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, So we're getting from the back from like the nights. We get them, Yeah, we get them from getting from the actions in space. We're getting shot out from some someplace in the universe we don't even know, right, the cosmic rays aren't aren't just all coming from the Sun. Some of them were getting bombarded by rays from all directions. You're saying that's right, Lots of things in space make cosmic grays, our son other sons, black holes, pulsars, all those crazy things that 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 feeling out stuff. That's right, it's making cosmic rays, and some of them land on Earth and their clue right there, clues to what happened, What made this neutrino and 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 will never get to and things will 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? Yea, the higher the energy, the more the more rare they are. So for example, at ten to the twenty one 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 kilometers, 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 wouldn't would have to wait a long time to observe them. But if you have a big detective you're 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 one kilometer square around you, you have to wait a hundred years to see one of these high energy particles come down on you. That's right exactly. But and to me, the most interesting thing about these particles is that, um, we have no idea what could be making them. I mean, I've asked after a physicists have said, what's the highest energy particle? You imagine in space anywhere in the universe, use anything you want. And they start with like a supernova, huge explosion, particles going super fast. Then they sling shot 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 that like tend to the seventeen tend of the eighteen, 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's right, 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. And so that's a clue that there's something out there waiting to be discovered. You know, these are clues that are surfing along on the cosmos, being delivered to Earth and saying there's something interesting, pay attention. Wow. So that's a huge mystery. So but you I'm sure if physicists have ideas like what could these crazy high energy particles be or be coming from? I think it's a fantastic four. Yeah, I think they're form of vengeance. It's Stanley shooting from head. Yeah, exactly, and I want to talk about that some more, but first let's take a quick break. 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 of these things ever seen, and they don't like all come from the Sun or from one point, and it's ways. But we do have some fun ideas, you know, and one of my favorites, of course, is maybe it's not some thing that's shooting these cosmic rays at us. Maybe it's some one. Right. We'd imagine if if we found all these cosmic rays, and we got more of them somehow, and we could tell if 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 something on that planet capable of shooting particles at an unnatural energy. Right before suggests trying to kill it was like shooting deadly raise 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. Um. That seems more are possible to you then that they might be shooting at us to kill us. Why would they try to shoot us for so far away? What is the goal of beaming you know, a crazy cosmic death ray all the way across the universe? Or maybe do you think maybe they could be talking to us, like, hey, like this is morse code, like did for sure? For sure, it's a good way to send a message, right, a type beam of particles um and so we could certainly contain some information. So that's one crazy ideas. 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 sound 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 into you into photons, they can Photons can fly through the universe for billions and billions of light years. The universe is opaque. Two particles at this energy, they can't fly forever through the 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. I see. It's like, um, the universe is thinker 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 by cosmic standards, right, 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 a 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. 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, that's one. That's another idea. Okay, that's the kind of the vanilla idea. That's the vanilla board, crazy, vanilla crazy idea. I know. I'm sure astrophysicists would love to discover a new kind of star that purps out highendgy particles, but I think it would be kind of boring because the other ideas are crazy, like some of 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 um super high endry cosmic rays are a clue that there's a glitch in the simulation. What so that that's two things. One is that he's saying, Um, the universe is a simulation, and too, there could be gligen it. Yeah, exactly. And the idea is basically, if the universe is a simulation, then probably whoever is running that simulation has sliced the universe up into 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 fact asked so that it crosses over those cubes like starts in one 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, that that could be a clue that the universe is a simulation. And he's found the glitch. Wow, And then what so? Or the other possibility, right, is that it could be something entirely new that we never discovered in the universe. Maybe there's some kind of special, some some some 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 holes, nebula, it's some new thing, something, 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 Richard trying to collect as many of them as we can, right because that's the number one clue is where they're 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 galaxies, 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. Um. 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 men being able to measure their angle under 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 and say it didn't happen pickure, didn't happen exactly. And so we have these really awesome um cosmic ray telescopes. So these things are really big, right, they cover huge amounts, Like there's one in South America called the o G Observatory. It takes up a huge swath of land in Argentina and um, you know, thousands of square kilometers, so they get a lot of 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 is even bigger. It's awesome, but even still, you know, it's a tiny fraction of the Earth. Because you can't cover the whole Earth in particle detectors, right, people will get kind of upset, 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 one kilometer square and wait a hundred years. You just have to have a big catcher's globe. Right. Yeah, well you could wait a hundred years, but I don't really want to. And your options are wait a long time or build a bigger detector. And uh 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 them at the Comma desert. It's like little dishes spread out, that's right. Because what happens when a cosmic ray hits the atmosphere, if you remember we talked about earlier, is it creates a big splash. Right, One particle hits and it 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. Um that's that tells you what that particle was and where it came from, 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. That doesn't have to be blanketed, but you need like one every you know, or one every kilometer or something. Right, So you're saying these are really expensive, and the bigger they are, the more expensive to get. But something interesting is that you are involved in this sort of new way to the tet 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 than 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, their 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 size 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 but that's been spent on phones is staggering. I mean, there's like a million Android phones turned on every single day. You know, It's like trillions of dollars have been spent on consumer electronics. And we thought, let's piggyback on that and use some of it for science, because there's no way we're getting the government to build us a trillion dollar particle detector. So 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 Crayface 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 where they're coming from and who is sending us crazy messages. 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. Um. It could be hey do you guys want superpowers? Or hey do you have a cup of sugar? Um. So, so people at home listening to this could be part of the scientific Endebt 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 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 have no 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 to see thousands and millions of them before we have an idea of where they're coming from, what's causing them. We just need more data. So this is such a fascinating thing to me, just the sense, just the idea that there might be something in the universe out there that we still don't know. You know, it's like certain, Yeah, I'm certain. I mean even a cognate craze aside. The universe is filled with crazy stuff, and every decade we discovered new crazier stuff than we could have even ever imagined. So this is fantastic because you're right, it's a concrete clue. It's the universe giving us the direction is weird look to find new crazy stuff. But I'm sure already that there's crazy stuff in the universe we never imagined. Yeah, and we're being bathed in it, right, like we're constantly getting being bombarded by these clues that there's that there's mystery that's right in the universe is sending us these messages, and it's wondering why are these eyes taken so long to figure it out? We're right here, that's right. Yeah, So cosmic rays, these super high your cosmic grades of the mysteries for decades. We've known about these things for decades and we just haven't figured it out yet. Alright, So thanks everyone for listening to the mystery of cosmic rays. 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 the publicy. I'd love to be included before you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. 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