11.

Who Is Shooting Superfast

Particles at the Earth?
In Which You Learn That Space
Is Full of Tiny Bullets

I f you woke up one morning to discover that your house was being
sprayed with bullets, that might qualify as an emergency situation. You
wouldnt just relax, get dressed, and go about your day hoping that poorly
funded scientists would eventually figure it out.
It just so happens that this is precisely your situation at this very mo-
ment if you think of the Earth as your house and cosmic rays as bullets.
Millions of these bullets hit our atmosphere every day, carrying with them
more combined energy than an exploding nuclear bomb.
And the alarming thing is that we have no idea what (or who) is shoot-
ing them at us.
We dont know where they are coming from exactly, or why there are
so many of them. And we dont know what process in nature could

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 186 We Have No Idea

possibly be making such energetic ammunition. It might be aliens, or it

might be something totally new that weve never seen before. The answer
is beyond anything than even our overimaginative scientists can dream up
right now.
So what are these enigmatic cosmic rays, and why are we being pelted
with them at enormous energies? Find some cover and read on to learn
more about this cosmic mystery.

What Are Cosmic Rays?

The name cosmic ray might be a little unnecessarily intriguing; it sim-

ply means a particle from space. Stars and other objects are constantly
shooting out photons, protons, neutrinos, and even some heavy ions.

Our Sun, for example, is a major producer of space particles. Other

than making the obvious visible light for which it became famous, the Sun
also makes high-energy photons (UV light, gamma rays) that can pene-
trate far enough into your body to cause cancer. And thats nothing

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 Who Is Shooting Superfast Particles at the Earth? 187

compared to the neutrinos that come from the Suns fusion furnace: about
100 billion neutrinos from the Sun pass through your fingernail each sec-
ond. Since neutrinos rarely interact with other bits of matter, this is not
something you feel or have to worry about. Of those 100 billion neutri-
nos, only one of them on average will even notice that you are there and
bounce off of a particle in your thumb. An average neutrino will pass
right through the Earth without interacting, so while the bad news is that
there is no shielding yourself from the zillions of neutrinos, the good news
is that neutrinos really cant be bothered to hurt you.

Much more dangerous to the delicate machinery of human life are

heavier charged particles such as protons or atomic nuclei. A high-energy
proton can tear through the human body causing significant destruction.
Astronauts have to take special care and make sure that they are always
shielded, which requires much more than slathering on sunscreen. More-
over, the Sun, like any enormous ball of fire, can be unpredictable. Most
of the time it simmers nicely at a gazillion degrees, but sometimes it has
indigestion that results in solar flares. These flares send strands of plasma
far out into space and release extra doses of dangerous particles. Anyone
spending time in space needs to have accurate predictions of the Suns
weather and get behind extra shielding very quickly when one of these
flares is detected.
The point is that there are zillions of space particles hitting the Earth
all the time. And they carry a lot of energy.

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 188 We Have No Idea

Fortunately for us on the surface, we are mostly protected by the

Earths atmosphere.74 Most of the high-energy particles that hit the Earth
slam into the air and gas molecules covering the surface of the Earth and
break up, causing massive showers of lower-energy particles. If you ever
wondered where the aurora borealis or aurora australis (i.e., the northern
and southern lights) come from, they are the glow that comes from the
stream of cosmic rays diverted by the Earths magnetic field to the North
and South poles.
But this protection only works when you are at the surface. If you
spend any significant time far above the surfaceas a flight attendant or
a stowawayyou will receive more of this radiation. Unfortunately,
wearing sunscreen on an airplane does not help.
How fast are these particles going? Down on the surface of the Earth,
the world record for making fast particles is held by the Large Hadron
Collider, which zooms them around at almost ten teraelectron volts (1013
eV). Anything with the prefix tera sounds impressive, but compared to
the energy of the particles coming from space, its pretty ho-hum. Cosmic
rays hitting the Earth at the ten-teraelectron-volt energy level happen all
the time. They are hitting the Earths atmosphere at a rate of about one
per square meter per second right now. If that sounds like a lot to you, it
should, because they carry the energy equivalent of one slow-moving
school bus raining down on every square meter of our world every
second.
But then there are cosmic rays that hit the Earth at even higher

74 If youre reading this book on the International Space Station, please send us a picture.

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 Who Is Shooting Superfast Particles at the Earth? 189

energiesmuch, much higher energies. They make the particles we accel-

erate at the LHC seem like a baby crawling in slow motion through pea-
nut butter. The highest-energy particle we have seen hit the Earth clocked
in at over 1020 eV, which is almost two million times more energetic than
the LHCs fastest particles. The record-setting space particle was going so
fast that physicists nicknamed it the Oh-My-God particle. And when
jaded physicists start sounding like flabbergasted teenagers, you know
they are impressed.
Particles with this kind of crazy energy are surprisingly common. Al-
most 500 million of them hit the Earth every year. Thats more than a
million each day, or three hundred each second. Just now, while you read
this sentence, over a thousand of them (the energy equivalent of two bil-
lion slow-moving buses) hit the Earth.
But here is the mind-blowing fact about particles this high on the en-
ergy spectrum: we dont know anything in the universe that is capable of
making such high-energy particles.
Thats right, we are being bombarded by millions of extremely high-en-
ergy particles on a daily basis, and we have no idea what could be creating
them. If you ask astrophysicists75 to estimate what the highest speed a
particle anywhere in space could ever have (based on what we know right
now), they will (a) thank you for asking them such a cool question, (b)

75 We have.

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 190 We Have No Idea

come up with crazy situations like particles surfing on exploding superno-

vas or black holes swinging particles around like slingshots, and (c) still
come up short. Based on all the things we know about in the universe
right now, the highest energy a particle could have in space is about 1017
eV, which is still more than a thousand times less energetic than the ones
we see hitting the Earth every day.
Imagine if your Ferrari dealer told you that the car they sold you
would max out at 200 miles per hour, and then you showed them that it
could hit 200,000 miles per hour. You would conclude that even the
worlds Ferrari experts are more than a little clueless.76

That is the case with cosmic rays. There are cosmic rays hitting the
Earth at energy levels that cannot be explained by anything we know in
the universe, which can only mean one thing: there must be a new kind of
object in the universe that we dont know about.
Okay, that seems like obvious logic when you write it down, but its
still a mind-boggling statement. Despite everything we know about the
universe (at least 5 percent of it) and centuries of looking at the stars and
building incredible high-precision tools, there are still things in the uni-
verse we havent seen. Whatever is making these crazy-energy cosmic rays
remains a mystery. And the fun thing is that the particles it sends us are
clues about where the source is and what it could be, making this a spe-
cific puzzle that we can immediately sink our teeth into.

76 Yes, astrophysicists are Ferrari dealers in this analogy.

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