What are cosmic rays? Galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) are the high-energy particles that flow into our solar system from far away in the Galaxy. GCRs are mostly pieces of atoms: protons, electrons, and atomic nuclei which have had all of the surrounding electrons stripped during their high-speed (almost the speed of light) passage through the Galaxy. Cosmic rays provide one of our few direct samples of matter from outside the solar system. The magnetic fields of the Galaxy, the solar system, and the Earth have scrambled the flight paths of these particles so much that we can no longer point back to their sources in the Galaxy. If you made a map of the sky with cosmic ray intensities, it would be completely uniform. So we have to determine where cosmic rays come from by indirect means. About 90% of the cosmic ray nuclei are hydrogen (protons), about 9% are helium (alpha particles), and all of the rest of the elements make up only 1%. Even in this one percent there are very rare elements and isotopes. These require large detectors to collect enough particles to say something meaningful about the fingerprint of their source. The HEAO Heavy Nuclei Experiment, launched in 1979, collected only about 100 cosmic rays between element 75 and element 87 (the group of elements that includes platinum, mercury, and lead), in almost a year and a half of flight, and it was much bigger than most scientific instruments flown by NASA today. To make better measurements requires an even larger instrument, and the bigger the instrument, the greater the cost. Where do they come from? Most galactic cosmic rays are probably accelerated in the blast waves of supernova remnants. This doesnt mean that the supernova explosion itself gets the particles up to these speeds. The remnants of the explosions, expanding clouds of gas and magnetic field, can last for thousands of years, and this is where cosmic rays are accelerated. Bouncing back and forth in the magnetic field of the remnant randomly lets some of the particles gain energy, and become cosmic rays. Eventually they build up enough speed that the remnant can no longer contain them, and they escape into the Galaxy. Because the cosmic rays eventually escape the supernova remnant, they can only be accelerated up to a certain maximum energy, which depends upon the size of the acceleration region and the magnetic field strength. However, cosmic rays have been observed at much higher energies than supernova remnants can generate, and where these ultra-high-energies come from is a big question. Perhaps they come from outside the Galaxy, from active galactic nuclei, quasars or gamma ray bursts. Or perhaps theyre the signature of some exotic new physics: superstrings, exotic dark matter, strongly-interacting neutrinos, or topological defects in the very structure of the universe. Questions like these tie cosmic-ray astrophysics to basic particle physics and the fundamental nature of the universe. imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/cosmic_rays.html Composed of a single proton and a single electron, hydrogen is the simplest and most abundant element in the universe. It is estimated that 90% of the visible universe is composed of hydrogen From the Greek words hydro and genes, which together mean water forming. Almost 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of the six elements oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. All are necessary to life. The remaining elements are trace elements, of which more than a dozen are thought to be necessary for life, or play a role in good health (e.g., fluorine, which hardens dental enamel but seems to have no other function). An easy way to remember the six most essential elements in living organisms is CHONPC (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium).
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 04:28:44 +0000
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