Citizen Science No. 11 by Jamie Zvirzdin
Desert Vigil: Patience and the Pulse of Cosmic-Ray Secrets
I am not a patient person, usually. I check the time frequently and grow frustrated if a task takes more than two seconds to finish. The exception is my job: I work for the Telescope Array Collaboration, which studies ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays. Tracking these types of rare particles in the high, dry desert of Utah requires a superhuman amount of patience, dedication, and collaboration.
Once in a while, this patient sleuthing yields a gratifying breakthrough. Last week, Thanksgiving 2023, the Telescope Array Collaboration announced the detection of a UHECR named Amaterasu (https://scienmag.com/telescope-array-detects-second-highest-energy-cosmic-ray-ever/), which had 244 exaelectronvolts of energy—about 40 joules, enough energy to run a modern laptop for a few seconds or raise a small book to the top of a tall shelf. While 40 joules may not seem like a big deal, it’s an enormous, astonishing, brain-shattering amount of energy for a tiny particle. Amaterasu had so much energy that it broke what you might call “the particle speed limit,” the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin cutoff, at around 60 EeV (about 10 joules).
