Galactic cosmic ray
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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. Galactic cosmic rays differ in their composition and origin from solar cosmic rays, which are mostly protons and helium nuclei accelerated by solar activity. The mean energies of galactic cosmic rays also are much higher than the energies of solar cosmic rays.
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.
One of the indirect observations we can make, the "composition" of GCRs, can tell us a lot about the sources and the cosmic rays' trip through the Galaxy. The "composition" of cosmic rays is the way in which the cosmic rays are divided up into each of the different types, what fraction is protons, what fraction is helium nuclei, etc. All of the natural elements in the periodic table are present in cosmic rays, in roughly the same proportion as they occur in the solar system. But detailed differences provide a "fingerprint" of the cosmic ray's source. Measuring the quantity of each different element is relatively easy, since the different charges of each nucleus give very different signatures. Harder to measure, but a better fingerprint, is the isotopic composition (nuclei of the same element but with different numbers of neutrons). To tell the isotopes apart involves, in effect, weighing each atomic nucleus that enters the cosmic ray detector.
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.
Oddly, the isotope 7Be is found in galactic cosmic rays. In common environments this nuclide decays to 7Li by electron capture, meaning that one of the orbital electrons combines with the nucleus, reducing its charge from 4 to 3 units (a neutrino is also emitted in this process.) Cosmic rays are fully stripped, meaning that they have lost all their electrons; thus 7Be persists and can be observed. Other radioactive elements, called clock isotopes are present: Be-10 (1.6 million year halflife), Al-26 (0.87 Myr), Cl-36 (0.30 Myr), and Mn-54 (0.8 Myr estimated). The abundances of all of these radioactive species are small compared to those of neighboring isotopes because significant fractions have been lost by decay during the ~10 Myr the cosmic rays have spent in the Galaxy before arriving at Earth. Even so, small quantities of these nuclides are clearly observed and can be used to investigate the confinement time of cosmic rays in the Galaxy and the distribution of matter with which cosmic ray particles interact to produce secondary nuclei. Thus the name clock isotopes; they tell us how long since the cosmic rays were produced.
Where do they come from?
Most galactic cosmic rays are probably accelerated in the blast waves of supernova remnants. This doesn't 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 randomly back and forth in the magnetic field of the remnant 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 bursters. Or perhaps they're the signature of some exotic new physics: superstrings, 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.
Source for an earlier version of the above article: CRAZY (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/cosmic_rays.html)
See also
External links
- Open Directory Project: Cosmic Rays (http://www.dmoz.org/Science/Physics/Particle/Astro_Particle/Cosmic_Rays/)
- Cosmic Ray resources on the Net (http://www.dias.ie/c4/resources.html)
- 23 April, 2002, BBC News, Cosmic ray mystery 'solved' (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1945000/1945504.stm)
- 4 November, 2004, BBC News, Supernova produces cosmic rays (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3981619.stm)
- Clock Isotopes in Cosmic Rays (http://www.srl.caltech.edu/ACE/ACENews/ACENews9.html)