Latest Cosmic ray Stories

On November 17th, the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission reached another important milestone on its epic out-of-ecliptic journey: the start of the third passage over the Sun's south pole.Launched in 1990, the European-built spacecraft is engaged in the exploration of the heliosphere, the bubble in space blown out by the solar wind. Given the capricious nature of the Sun, this third visit will undoubtedly reveal new and unexpected features of our star's environment. The first polar passes in 1994...

Almost every day, the great antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network turn to a blank patch of sky in the constellation Ophiuchus. Pointing at nothing, or so it seems, they invariably pick up a signal, faint but full of intelligence. The source is beyond Neptune, beyond Pluto, on the verge of the stars themselves. It's Voyager 1. The spacecraft left Earth in 1977 on a mission to visit Jupiter and Saturn. Almost 30 years later, with the gas giants long ago seen and done, Voyager 1 is still going...

NASA -- Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into deep space. The other stays on Earth. When the traveling twin returns home, he discovers he's younger than his brother. This is Einstein's Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. Rocketing to Alpha Centauri--warp 9, please--is a good way to stay young....

SWRI -- When Voyager 1 finally crossed the "termination shock" at the edge of interstellar space in December 2004, space physicists anticipated the long-sought discovery of the source of anomalous cosmic rays. These cosmic rays, among the most energetic particle radiation in the solar system, are thought to be produced at the termination shock - the boundary at the edge of the solar system where the million-mile-per-hour solar wind abruptly slows. A mystery unfolded instead when...

TOKYO -- Hoping to unlock the mysteries of black holes and the Big Bang, a team of scientists from Japan and seven other countries has apparently detected its first neutrinos in a multiyear project underway in Antarctica. The project, dubbed "IceCube," was launched in 2002, but only detected its first neutrinos on Jan. 29, recording the faint flashes of light given off by the particles when they interact with electrons in water molecules, team member Shigeru Yoshida, a cosmic-ray...

ESA -- Cosmic space is filled with continuous, diffuse high-energy radiation. To find out how this energy is produced, the scientists behind ESA's Integral gamma-ray observatory have tried an unusual method: observing Earth from space.During a four-phase observation campaign started on January 24th this year, continued until February 9th, Integral has been looking at Earth. Needing complex control operations from the ground, the satellite has been kept in a fixed orientation in space,...

NASA's Voyager 1 has passed into the border region at the edge of the solar system and now is sending back information about this never-before-explored area, say scientists at the University of Maryland. "We have confirmed, for the first time, that Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock on Dec. 16, 2004," said Frank McDonald, a senior research scientist at the university's Institute for Physical Science and Technology, and a coauthor on two of four Voyager 1 papers published in the...

Chandra -- Astronomers have found compelling evidence that a supernova shock wave has produced a large amount of cosmic rays, particles of mysterious origin that constantly bombard the Earth. This discovery, made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, supports theoretical arguments that shock waves from stellar explosions may be a primary source of cosmic rays.This finding is important for understanding the origin of cosmic rays, which are atomic nuclei that strike the Earth's atmosphere with...

A "designer material" derived from plastic could help protect astronauts on their way to MarsNASA -- After reading this article, you might never look at trash bags the same way again.We all use plastic trash bags; they're so common that we hardly give them a second thought. So who would have guessed that a lowly trash bag might hold the key to sending humans to Mars?Most household trash bags are made of a polymer called polyethylene. Variants of that molecule turn out to be...

First simultaneous observation of a gamma-ray burst in the X-ray and in the very high energy gamma ray bandFor the first time a gamma-ray burst (GRB) has been observed simultaneously in the X-ray and in the very high energy gamma ray band. The MAGIC telescope at La Palma, Canary Islands, observed the enigmatic source GRB050713A, a long duration gamma-ray burst, only 40 seconds after the explosion, at photon energies above 175 GeV.The puzzling nature of gamma-ray bursts is still not fully...