Scientific Highlights

The highest energy cosmic rays remain elusive and mysterious, and their study requires extraordinary efforts.

Maxwell’s unified description of electric and magnetic phenomena is one of the greatest achievements of 19th century physics.

Cosmic rays are energetic particles, mostly atomic nuclei, raining down upon the Earth from the depths of the cosmos.

The Pierre Auger Collaboration measured a dipolar anisotropy in the arrival-direction distribution of the cosmic rays with energies in excess of 8x10¹⁸ eV, finding that the flux is about
6.5% larger than the average in one direction of the sky and it is correspondingly smaller in the opposite direction.

One of the biggest challenges in cosmic-ray physics is to accurately pin down the absolute energy of a measured cosmic ray.

Billions of subatomic particles can be created in cosmic-ray induced air showers.