What is the Moon good for? Aside from inspiring poets, helping you see at night, and giving Neil Armstrong some place for a stroll, what can you do with it? If you ask scientists at the University of Southampton, they’ll tell you that it makes a cracking particle detector. With the help of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, the team hopes to use the mass of the satellite to detect the most energetic particles known; Ultra-High-Energy (UHE) cosmic rays.
For all the advances of science over the past century, the universe still throws some major mysteries our way. One of the biggest of these is UHE cosmic rays. The particles that make up UHE cosmic rays have a kinetic energy many orders of magnitude greater than that of other cosmic ray particles, measuring over 1018 eV. One particle, called the Oh-My-God particle, was detected in 1961 with an energy of 3×1020 eV, which is the equivalent of a baseball traveling at 62 mph (100 km/h) – an alarming amount of energy to stuff into a subatomic particle. What particularly intrigues physicists about these rays is that they must be relatively young, otherwise their energy would have dissipated due to photon scattering, so where they come from is a major question mark in modern cosmology.
via Gizmag
