Remember, a few weeks ago when we wrote about the Long Duration Balloon launch? The instrument that went up with the balloon was called CREAM. Our initial thought was that they were looking for a great cup of coffee.
Well, we were wrong. It turns out they were really searching for were cosmic rays - Cosmic Ray Energetics And Mass. It turns out that the fancy particle accelerators that exist on Earth are cool but do not create high enough energies to study certain aspects of particle physics. This instrument is designed to collect data from high energy cosmic rays that pass through Earth's atmosphere. They hope that by better understanding these cosmic rays they can develop a more complete picture of what happens when stars explode and how the universe was created. Between this project and other similar projects, they have collected data from every naturally occurring element from Hydrogen to Uranium (atomic number 92). Some of their data matches up with the Big Bang Theory. There is a reason that they aren't doing this research in Kansas.
No comments:
Post a Comment