{"id":629432,"date":"2026-09-27T21:32:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T21:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/629432\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T21:32:19","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T21:32:19","slug":"how-do-cosmic-rays-from-outer-space-enter-earths-atmosphere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/629432\/","title":{"rendered":"How do cosmic rays from outer space enter Earth’s atmosphere?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Researchers have used CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider to model how high-energy cosmic rays enter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

The Northern Lights, which occur when particles from the Sun enter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, generate brilliant sky displays in our Northern Hemisphere, offering an occasional cosmic show enjoyed by millions.<\/p>\n

But how collisions between these particles, or low-energy cosmic rays, and the Earth\u2019s gases result in the Northern Lights are less well-understood.<\/p>\n

Even more puzzling are collisions involving high-energy cosmic rays, which possess more than one million times the energy than those from the Sun and emanate from exploding stars, or supernovae. Scientists have typically relied on computer simulations to unpack their collision with Earth\u2019s atmosphere, but these methods have produced varied, and sometimes conflicting, results.<\/p>\n

New research by an international team of physicists takes an unprecedented approach that offers a clearer understanding of these interstellar wonders.<\/p>\n

Using CERN\u2019s Large Hadron Collider, the scientists have recreated how high-energy cosmic rays enter the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and collide with our planet\u2019s gases.<\/p>\n

The results in the journal Physical Review Letters<\/a>\u00a0help decipher the origins of interstellar particles from the cosmos.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe now have a better understanding of how particles from objects more exotic than the Sun interact with our atmosphere,\u201d says Jesse Liu, a New York University assistant professor of physics who led the research.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy advancing our knowledge of high-energy cosmic collisions in the Earth\u2019s atmosphere, we have taken another step to unraveling the many mysteries of our universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe published results are indeed something special because these data are unique, and in our measurements, we were able to show that our previous models for this type of interaction are actually very inaccurate,\u201d adds Cigdem Issever, a physicist at Humboldt-University of Berlin and one of the paper\u2019s authors.<\/p>\n

Recognizing the limitations of computer simulations, Liu, Issever, and their colleagues, who included scientists from Hamburg\u2019s DESY Research Center, turned to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)\u2014the world\u2019s most powerful particle physics machine, located outside of Geneva\u2014to devise an innovative experiment that mimics how high-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Focusing on oxygen\u2019s foundational role in Earth\u2019s atmosphere, the scientists introduced oxygen beams for the first time in the LHC and collided them with LHC-generated proton beams, which replicate the cosmic rays that emanate from supernovae. The results constituted the world\u2019s first measurements of cosmic rainstorms recreated in controlled-lab conditions.<\/p>\n

The researchers took millions of closeup photos of these outcomes using a 100-million-pixel camera that captures the aftermath of proton collisions that occur up to 40 million times per second.<\/p>\n

Part of CERN\u2019s ATLAS collaboration, which is exploring the fundamental nature of matter and the basic forces that shape the universe, the sophisticated device measured the number, energies, and angles of particles made in the proton-oxygen collision to offer precise portraits of the birth of these cosmic rainstorms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese new results significantly sharpen our knowledge of these subatomic interactions and will help us further explore the nature of cosmic particles raining from the sky,\u201d concludes Liu.<\/p>\n

Source: New York University<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Share this Article You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Researchers have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629433,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[6795,85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-629432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-atmosphere","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}