Yes, I know about space detectors, and high altitude balloon detectors.ORION111 wrote:JNW, would you like to provide legitimate references? You do know we have detectors in space recording cosmic rays and ultra-high energy photons directly?
These detectors don't have a very large collecting area. Cosmic rays of 10^17eV and higher are very rare. A square meter of earth's surface may only get one or two such cosmic rays PER CENTURY. So no, these detectors don't detect ultra high energy cosmic rays.
There is also the problem that these detectors are rather thin. That's good enough for low energy cosmic rays, but not for the ultra high energy cosmic rays. There is a reason why the main detectors of the LHC are so large. They have to be large to tell what's going on with these high energy collisions. So even if one of these cosmic rays hit a detector, it wouldn't give us much useful information.
To detect ultra high energy cosmic rays, you need something like the Pierre Auger Observatory. This observatory covers thousands of square kilometers. It has telescopes that monitor the sky for fluorescence of nitrogen molecules caused by the secondary particles, and an array of water tanks that act as Cherenkov detectors. This gives us a rough estimate of the energy and direction of a cosmic ray. It doesn't tell much about the what the cosmic ray was, except that it was able to dump a lot of energy into the atmosphere when it hit.
Ugh! First you declare me wrong, then instead of giving any reason you give a link to an irrelevant Wikipedia article.ORION111 wrote:This statement is wrong. First, learn about cosmic rays.JNW wrote:It looks to me like assuming these particles are protons is pure guesswork, and a poor guess at that.
This is not about low energy cosmic rays, it's about ultra high energy cosmic rays. The correct Wikipedia article is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high ... cosmic_ray
Now let's look at that article. It says (of the OMG particle) "It was most probably a proton". But where did that come from? Well there's a reference given, and it's even a link! http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/OhMyGodParticle/
So we now look at that link, and it says: "All evidence points to these extremely high energy particles being protons"
Huh? What evidence? I keep seeing statements like this, but never any evidence to back them up. That's what's bothering me.
I've looked and I did find things like: http://dpnc.unige.ch/ams/ICRC-03/FILES/PDF/101.pdf
That seems to rule out gamma rays, but that's about it.
And the KASCADE results seem to suggest that protons go up to around 10e16 eV.
What I haven't found is any good evidence that some cosmic rays of 10^17 and above are protons.
But I am not the one making the claim that needs to be proved. You, ORION111, are the one who claims that there are cosmic ray events that are just like LHC collisions. That is only true if some of the cosmic rays above 10^17eV are protons. I can find no evidence for that, and you have provided no evidence for that. The burden of proof is on you.