A research team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences has discovered evidence that there is a mysterious barrier at the center of the galaxy that appears to block the passage of cosmic rays, yet paradoxically can also accelerate those same charged particles back nearly to the speed of light. Cosmicread more
Soon, the growing capability of your smartphone could be harnessed to detect cosmic rays in much the same way as high-end, multimillion-dollar observatories.
With a simple app addition, Android phones, and likely other smartphone brands in the not-too-distant future, can be turned into detectors to capture the light particles created when cosmic rays crash into Earth’s atmosphere.
“The apps basically transform the phone into a high-energy particle detector,” explains Justin Vandenbroucke, a University of Wisconsin-Madison assistant professor of physics and a researcher at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC). “It uses the same principles as these very large experiments.”
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Hopes of finding intelligent life in the universe have been raised by more unidentified signals from outer space detected by astronomers in Puerto Rico, validating reports of similar signals identified by researchers in Australia.
The discovery of a split-second burst of radio waves by scientists using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico provides important new evidence of mysterious pulses that appear to come from deep in outer space.
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The unfathomable mystery of how this Universe was brought forth into being has preoccupied the mind of Man since he became cognisant of his own existence. Latterly, Science has been able to provide the likely cosmic nuts and bolts of the process, with the most widely accepted concept being known as the "Big Bang" theory.
Though the name implies a huge detonation, the "Big Bang" was more of an expansion than an explosion, an expansion that is still continuing today, but recent research suggests that if this type of event had indeed created the Universe then, theoretically, it should not exist at all.
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