What is the Purpose of the Cosmic Ray Observatory?

[Orion1]

{copyrighted material deleted by Phobos - please check out the link instead}

Reference:
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Jan/01132004/utah/128616.asp

 

[wolram]

this site shows a headline but no script, it may be a
temp fault, can you give any info as to what this is about?

 

[Nereid]

A new cosmic ray observatory being built in Utah - 'the Telescope Array'. Works on the same principle as many others already built (e.g. Fly Eye), Cherenkov radiation* emitted by the charged particle rays as they encounter a medium where the speed of light is slower than the one they were in (atmosphere vs space). They're looking for CRs beyond the GKZ limit*, and to do that you need a huge array. Will take four years to build. There's been limited data to date on whether there are CRs beyond the GKZ.

For more on the whole area of high-energy astrophysics, see the Stecker paper (it's in another thread somewhere here - really interesting stuff!)

*links:
Cherenkov: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/CherenkovRadiation.html
GKZ limit: http://www.phys.washington.edu/~walta/importance.html

 

[Orion1]

GKZ Probability...



What is the cosmic ray-microwave background radiation interaction Mean Free Path formula for cosmic rays exceeding GKZ limit?

E_GKZ = 10^19 eV
E_CRB >= 10^21 eV

Reference:
http://www.phys.washington.edu/~walta/importance.html

 

[Nereid]

Stecker (and refs therein)

in Stecker:

marcus wrote: the survey "Cosmic Physics: the High Energy Frontier" is at
http://arxiv.org/astro-ph/0309027

from this thread: https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=11309