Physicists zoom into the birth of cosmic rainstorms with new CERN study

Researchers at CERN used the Large Hadron Collider to collide oxygen atoms with protons for the first time, simulating how cosmic rays shatter into particle showers when they hit Earth's atmosphere. The ATLAS detector, a football-field-sized camera capable of 200 million photos a day, measured the resulting particle sprays over ten times more precisely than existing computer models predicted.

The point of the exercise is to settle disagreements among the models scientists use to interpret cosmic ray data gathered from ground-based telescope arrays like the one in Utah's high desert. Better data on the makeup of cosmic rays could clarify whether they come from exploding stars or supermassive black holes, and incidentally support unrelated fields like volcano imaging and pyramid scanning.

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