How do cosmic rays from outer space enter Earth’s atmosphere?

Scientists have utilized CERN's Large Hadron Collider to investigate how high-energy cosmic rays penetrate Earth's atmosphere. While the Northern Lights, caused by solar particles entering our atmosphere, are relatively well-understood, the processes behind collisions between high-energy cosmic rays—originating from exploding stars—and Earth's gases remain less clear.

Researchers from various institutions, including New York University and Humboldt-University of Berlin, collaborated to recreate these cosmic collisions in controlled lab conditions using the world's most powerful particle physics machine. By introducing oxygen beams into the Large Hadron Collider and colliding them with proton beams, the team observed the outcomes of these interactions for the first time.

Employing a state-of-the-art camera with 100 million pixels, they captured millions of images of the collision results, measuring crucial particle properties such as energy and angle. This groundbreaking approach provided highly precise data on the birth of cosmic rainstorms, significantly refining existing knowledge about these subatomic interactions and the origins of interstellar particles.

Assistant Professor Jesse Liu emphasized that these findings enhance our understanding of cosmic particle collisions and contribute to unraveling the mysteries of the universe.