Just visited the
Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on la Palma. Or basically had a look from afar on a bunch of telescopes!
The telescope above is the Gran Telescopio Canarias, it is the world's largest single-aperture optical telescope (source : wiki).
Lots of other interesting scopes too (the one on pillars is a dutch solar scope!):
The most interesting one is the magic telescope!
It looks for Cherenkov radiation (the light you get when very fast particles travel trough a medium with a speed which is higher than the speed of light in that medium). Cherenkov radiation is the blue light you also see in the water of a nuclear power plant.
<INTERMEZZO>:
The speed of light was the highest possible? And it was constant? How could it be depended on the medium? Did Einstein screw up?
No! The answer is: in a medium the light is "hopping" from atom to atom. More precisely from electron to electron. In between those hops the electron "holds" the energy of the light for a short moment. When it is released again it travels with the same speed of light we know & trust : c! But the average speed of light in a medium is lower than c because of the time the electrons keep hold of the energy...
</INTERMEZZO>
The Cherenkov radiation is generated when particle showers are created by very powerful cosmic rays.
This brings me to the point of this post!
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN accelerates particles to high speeds. This increases the energy of the particles. When they collide with a particle going the reversed direction the released energy creates new particles. These new particles give insight in new physics. The ultimate goal is to develop a
Theory of Everything. The higher the energy of the particles, the more insight into the working of nature it gives. The cost of building accelerators increases enormously with each new generation (which is capable of producing higher energy particles).
Now back to the Magic telescopes. Did you know that the energy contained in cosmic rays can be as high as
1020 eV?
Distribution of energies coming from cosmic rays (source: wiki)
Is that a lot?
YES, that is a lot.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is designed to smash two beams of particles (protons or lead nuclei) with resulting energies of 14 TeV.
Well surely that must be much more than a measly
1020 eV?
NO! It is more than a million times less than the energy of some cosmic rays!!!
The energies contained in the more powerful cosmic rays are so high that we could not reproduce this with current accelerator technology even if it was 100.000 times better!
So my guess is:
1) We are going to abandon the path of CERN and start looking more seriously at the sky..
or
2) We have to invent something drastically different to accelerate particles...
which should be possible because the total energy levels we are talking about are still relatively small
Source wiki:
- 6.24×1020 eV: energy needed to power a single 100 watt light bulb for one second.
The difficulty is in putting that small amount of energy in 1! particle
Happy New Year!!!!
