• Edward Wechner's patents

    My husband Edward Wechner's work - 2011 version.....

  • Chainless Biycle

    Edward 愛看Tour d' France, 每次看到看到那些賽手因為 jamming the chain, 而lose the race又或跌倒甚至傷得很重! 這是他自此而很大願望設計出一款比chain drive 鏈條單車更可reliability賴性, 更安全safety, without losing performance and without increasing the weight of the bicycle, but also inprove the efficiency...

  • Trench Casting Machine

    It does dig a trench 300mm wide and 6000mm deep and fills it with concrete simultaneously at an advance rate of 20m/hour....

  • 歐洲之旅, 第13天, 奧地利

    早上起來, 我們想再去 Buch 探 Heini, 因為 Heini 個仔 Simon 會回來 Buch. 於是我們由Lans 出發, 開去 Buch ...

  • 歐洲之旅, 第12天, 奧地利

    早上起來, 已是下雨天, 但是已到了 Fussen 了, 硬著頭皮都要去廸士尼用它做LOGO的 Schloss Neuschwanstein 天鵝城堡....

  • 歐洲之旅, 第7天, 瑞士, 德國 – part 2

    Rhine falls, 真是印象深刻和很壯觀. 玩完後, 我們驅車前往 Schaffhausen : Schaffhausen (German: Schaffhausen (help·info)) is a city in northern Switzerland and the capital of the canton of the same name; it has an estimated population of 34,587 as of December 2008....

  • 瑞士, 德國 – part 1

    早上起來, 車開出Zurich 市區, 再開去 Winterthur, Winterthur (pronounced: Ger. /ˈvɪntɐtu:ɐ̯ /, Eng. /ˈvɪntərtʊər/) is a city in the canton of Zurich in northern Switzerland. It has the country's sixth largest population with an estimate of more than 100,000 people. In the local dialect and by its inhabitants, ...

killer Lakes–Lake Nyos, Lake Monoum, Lake Kivu, Mammoth Lakes

 

The Killer Lakes (crater Lakes) of Cameroon :

1. Lake Nyon:

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Lake Nyos is a crater lake in the Northwest Region of Cameroon, located about 315 km (196 mi) northwest of Yaoundé.[1] Nyos is a deeplake high on the flank of an inactive volcano in the Oku volcanic plain along the Cameroon line of volcanic activity. A volcanic dam impounds the lake waters.

A pocket of magma (岩漿) lies beneath the lake and leaks carbon dioxide (CO2) into the water, changing it into carbonic acid. Nyos is one of only three known exploding lakes to be saturated with carbon dioxide in this way, the others being Lake Monoun, also in Cameroon, and Lake Kivuin Democratic Republic of Congo.

On August 21, 1986, possibly as the result of a landslide, Lake Nyos suddenly emitted a large cloud of CO2,………………..

What happens in such cases is that the CO2 is trapped in the water, which acts rather like the cork in a champagne bottle. Release the cork and you get an explosion of CO2 gas that has catastrophic consequences if the build up is too large. In this case, thousands of villagers lost their lives as well as many more thousands of livestock animals.

Imagine living in a remote village. Darkness has fallen and villagers are getting ready for bed, when suddenly you hear a loud 'boom'. Nothing too much to scare you in itself, but then comes the strange fog, rolling, rolling over everything, spreading out its poisonous tentacles. You and your family start to have trouble breathing. Desperate for air, you go outside – right into the deadly fog. This actual event befell 1,700 people and 3,500 animals on August 21, 1986 in Cameroon.

Though not completely unprecedented, it was the first known large-scale asphyxiation caused by a natural event. To prevent a recurrence, a degassing tube that siphons water from the bottom layers of water to the top allowing the carbon dioxide to leak in safe quantities was installed in 2001, and two additional tubes were installed in 2011.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos

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2. Lake Monoun, Cameroon

 

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The third of the three African exploding lakes, Lake Monoun also has the three essential elements needed to accumulate CO2 in deadly quantities. In order to do so, first these lakes need to be at least 160 feet deep; second, they have to have an equatorial location so gas won't naturally escape in the colder season; third, they must be situated in a volcanic region.

Lake Monoun is only 60 miles away from Lake Nyos. Two years before the larger catastrophe at Nyos in 1986, 37 people were killed from the lake overturn at Monoun. Twelve of the people were in a truck, but the two riding on top of it survived because CO2 is heavier than air and was lower to the ground.

 

 

3. Lake Kivu, Rwanda

 

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Another lake of stunning beauty, Lake Kivu is the second exploding lake in the mold of Lake Nyos – a body of water that experiences 'lake overturns'. Lake Kivu is 2000 square kilometers larger than Nyos and very close to an active volcano. The chemical gas that would lead to the overturn is also different; here, it is a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide. According to Wikimedia: "Scientists hypothesize that sufficient volcanic interaction with the lake's bottom water that has high gas concentrations would heat water, force the methane out of the water, spark a methane explosion, and trigger a nearly simultaneous release of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide would then suffocate large numbers of people in the lake basin as the gases roll off the lake surface. It is also possible that the lake could spawn lake tsunamis as gas explodes out of it."

If Kivu explodes, it will make the catastrophe at Nyos look small in comparison as there are two million people living in the basin here. Unfortunately, the sheer size of the lake makes degassing it with a pipe, as they are doing now at Lake Nyos, impossible. Therefore it is just a matter of time before it overturns, killing thousands of people in the surrounding area.


Read more at:  http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-killer-lakes?image=11#fSxtv7Dw5gd67Xkh.99

 

Read more at:

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange1/current/lectures/kling/killer_lakes/killer_lakes.html

 

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The Killer Lakes (crater Lakes) of America :

 

 

1. Mount Rainier Crater Lake, USA

 

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Mount Rainier's crater lake is unusual on this list; at the peak of the mountain is a large crater which is always covered in ice and snow. The lake is only reachable through underground caverns but is as deadly as many exposed ones. Only 70 miles from Seattle, the volcanic gas there is a threat to 100,000 people. Sulfur dioxide when combined with water forms sulfuric acid. The water in the crater lake and below the lake itself is creating sulfuric acid that is eating into the volcanic rock of the mountain. Most volcanic rock you find in the world is strong, but in parts of Mount Rainier it can easily crumble in your hand.If this rock (which is the what the mountain is made of) were to collapse in any area, it would cause something called a 'lahar', a slurry of mud, rock and ice. The rock collapse would also breach the lake, letting loose tons of water within it as well. It happened 500 years ago at Mount Rainier, and one 25 ton rock was found 30 miles away in the back of a garden from when the lahar buried the valley. This is not a question of if but when the people in the area are going to be quite literally buried – and no eruption is needed for this, just the erosion of rock and its collapse. There is a possibility the people of Seattle will be buried in mud and rock because of a natural event deadlier than eruptions themselves.
NASA recently announced that they had found an organism that used the arsenic in the lake in their DNA instead of phosphorus. Nevertheless, this a lake that exemplifies man's capacity to meddle with nature – with deadly consequences to all but the smallest and hardiest of of life forms.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/photogalleries/100518-mount-st-helens-americas-most-dangerous-volcanoes-science-pictures/#/most-dangerous-volcanoes-united-states-crater-lake-oregon_20364_600x450.jpg

 

 

2. Horseshoe Lake, USA

 

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Horseshoe Lake, near the town of Mammoth Lakes, California, is a silent killer. It is beautiful and deadly, and at its north end there are few trees or signs of life visible. Carbon dioxide is present at 95 times its normal quantities in the soil. A way to show the effect of this is to dig a hole in the sandy earth and then hold a flame inside it. It will extinguish right away as there is not enough oxygen. This has a deadly effect on humans. In the town or any windy area it often disperses, but in the lake itself and some areas surrounding it, it doesn't. In 2006, three people were killed by the CO2 build up in a cave not far from the lake where they took shelter. A frightening case of out of the frying pan, into the fire.

So far, evidence of 25 such explosions have been found to have taken place in the last 25,000 years, and another is long overdue. When the last one occurred, 100,000 gallons of boiling water exploded causing a tidal wave. Rock and mud covered 10 square miles. A small earthquake, normally harmless deep under the lake bed, would be enough to trigger such an explosion. The deadly potential is there. This is a lake to not only blow your mind, but blow away every other part of your body too!

 

 

3. Yellowstone Lake, USA

 

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Scientists have recently found a new way that crater lakes can kill. In 2003, they mapped the floor of the 3

 

stunning Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park, a very active volcanic region (hence the famous geysers). There they discovered a 100-foot dome on the floor in Mary's Bay. This dome was caused by water being heated under the lake bed, which then expands, building up pressure and creating the dome. A geyser is a small example, but unlike the dome in the lake, it has a relief valve. Without such a valve, there is a real hazard of what is known as a 'hydrothermal explosions

Interestingly, Lake Nyos does not produce anywhere near the amount of carbon dioxide that California's Horseshoe Lake does, as we will see later. If the gas had the devastating effect here, the people who live in the valley adjacent to Horseshoe are all in danger of the same fate. Lake Nyos was a warning sign to everyone: these killers are real. Men, women and children can die in a single evening from poisoned air!

 

 

 
 

Lake Natron:

lake-calcifies-animals-frozen-swallow_72201_600x450lake-calcifies-animals-frozen-flamingo_72200_600x450lake-calcifies-animals-frozen-bat_72197_600x450lake-calcifies-animals-frozen-fish-eagle_72199_600x450lake-calcifies-animals-frozen-dove_72198_600x450

It may look like this bird was gripped by the icy hand of death, but scientists will explain that it was actually calcified in the caustic waters of Tanzania’s Lake Natron. Photographer Nick Brandt’s eerie black and white photos allow both interpretations. ”I unexpectedly found the creatures — all manner of birds and bats — washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania. No one knows for certain exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake. ”The water has an extremely high soda and salt content, so high that it would strip the ink off my Kodak film boxes within a few seconds. The soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry,” Brandt writes in his new photo/essay book, Across The Ravaged Land. To give these obviously lifeless creatures an air of reanimation, Brandt picked them up off the shoreline and perched them in pre-death poses.

http://endtimeheadlines.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/deadly-lake-waters-turn-birds-to-stone/

 

Lake Natron is a salt lake located in northern Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, in the eastern branch of the East African Rift. The lake is fed by the Southern Ewaso Ng'iro River and also by mineral-rich hot springs. It is quite shallow, less than three metres (9.8 ft) deep, and varies in width depending on its water level, which changes due to high levels of evaporation, leaving behind a mixture of salts and minerals called natron(泡碱, 蘇打) . The surrounding country is dry and receives irregular seasonal rainfall. The lake falls within the Lake Natron Basin Wetlands of International Importance Ramsar Site. Temperatures in the lake can reach 60 °C (140 °F), and depending on rainfall, the alkalinity can reach a pH of 9 to 10.5 (almost as alkaline as ammonia).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Natron

 

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After read the above news on the web, the first thought on my mind is, has any human being turned to stone when they were swimming in this lake?

Therefore, I searched for the answer:

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http://www.geekosystem.com/natron-birds/

Contrary to Popular Belief, Lake Natron Does Not Instantly Turn Birds To Stone

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No one is disputing that Natron is a dangerous place for most species, of course. As the New Scientist says, the lake can reach temperatures up to 60 °C and has an alkalinity between pH 9 and pH 10.5, making it pretty dang gross on the best of days — it can even burn the skin and eyes of animals who aren’t adapted to it. It also does preserve many of these animals’ bodies, specifically due to the combination of chemicals that are deposited into the water via runoff from a nearby Great Rift Valley volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai.

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Therefore, I am sure people would not love to swimming in 60 °C lake.  and the calcifying, and the preservation process :

the preservation process is not something that happens instantaneously — it happens over a much longer period of time. So, the birds are not “stone,” preserve.  The chemical process to which they were subjected is much closer to Egyptian mummifcation than anything else, and although the bodies appear chalky and stone-like in appearance, but they are not completely immovable. After all, if that were the case then Brandt would not have been able to reposition his birds into such surreal and breathtaking poses.

Furthermore, there are species that are perfectly capable of living near lake Natron without facing inevitable doom — specifically, there are extremophile fish, bacterium, and a specific type of algae that thrives in the alkaline-rich waters. The lake is also one of the largest breeding ground for North Africa’s lesser flamingos (not to be confused with the greater flamingo, which has a different bill and is just a bit larger– you know, “greater”), who come to the lake to feed on the aforementioned algae. Yes, the occasional flamingo dies and is preserved, but as you can see from the featured image above, there are plenty more that come out just fine.

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In : 10 deadiest Lakes on Earth :-

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-killer-lakes?image=13#0ROTrswxewH6tG4j.99

I found lakes which are temperatures can reach 60 °C,  rich of minerals, salts and deadly :

1. Lake Rakshastal, Tibet

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Lake Rakshastal in Tibet is the body of water on the left in this picture, and unlike its sister, Lake Manasarovar, is a saltwater lake. No plants or fish survive in this water and the locals consider it poisonous. In fact, the myth is that it is the home of the 10-headed demon king, Lanka! In Buddhism, Lake Manasarovar is shaped like the sun and represents brightness, while Lake Rakshastal, shaped like a crescent, represents darkness. It certainly has brought darkness to anything that tried to live in it – the final darkness of death.

 

Read more at http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-killer-lakes?image=14#pEL1E3xEwpC5DHlq.99

2. Lake Mono, USA

mono-lake1

 

Mono Lake (/ˈmn/ moh-noh) is a large, shallow saline soda lake in Mono County, California, formed at least 760,000 years ago as a terminal lake in a basin that has no outlet to the ocean. The lack of an outlet causes high levels of salts to accumulate in the lake. These salts also make the lake water alkaline.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_Lake

Mono Lake is know for its tufa tower rock formation alongside its shores. It supports a unique productive ecosystem.There is no fish in the lake. Its warm ancient saline water inhabit trillions of brine shrimp and alkali flies. Although they've no value for humans, they're the food source for millions of migratory birds that visit the lake each year. Freshwater streams feed this lake, supporting lush riparian forests of cottonwood and willow along their banks.

3. Boiling Lake, Dominica ( the second largest hot lake in the world)

Dominicaboilinglakejpg.img_assist_custom-600x450

 

Boiling lake in Dominica is filled with bubbling superheated water that is enveloped in a vapor cloud. It is between 180 and 197 degrees Fahrenheit (82 to 91.5 Celsius) on the edges alone and will kill you in minutes. It is actually a flooded fumarole, a crack through which gases from molten lava below escape. The basin collects rainwater, and there are two streams which also empty into the lake, as well as groundwater seeping up through the hot rocks. For visitors, a slip here is really going to be a fall to one's death.

Read more at http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-killer-lakes?image=13#0ROTrswxewH6tG4j.99

 

 

@@@

actually, we have the world largest boiling lake in New Zealand call Frying Pan Lake: Although the average temperature of the lake is around 50°C the hottest areas are almost boiling.  As a result steam and various noxious gases are constantly released from Frying Pan Lake.

http://www.kuriositas.com/2012/10/fryingpanlake.html

 

 

to be continued with………….” Killer lake Nyons, Lake Kivu, Lake Monoun,…..

Ultra High-Energy Cosmic Rays 超高能宇宙線

Documentary: Global Village, Pampa Scientists.

On the Argentinian Pampas Antoine Le Tessier Selvant, the director of the CNRS法國國家科學研究中心, the national centre for scientific research, has been installing research tanks since the year 2000.  There are now 1600 of them in place and they constitute the world’s biggest ultra-high-energy cosmic ray observatory.  We visit the local residents to see what they make of the strange structures, and the scientists who look after this remarkable facility.

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Malargue was chosen by the National Centre for Scientific Research as a location to build the world’s biggest ultra-high-energy cosmic ray observatory.

every second, 200 cosmic rays hit every square metre of the planet.  Among these, a few have enough energy to lift a one-kilogram object a metre high.

The Pierre Auger Observatory was built to study these extremely rare ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, to understand their nature and origin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Auger_Observatory

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Along with the tanks placed one and a half kilometres apart, a network of 24 telescopes is used.  The role is observe particle showers produced by the cosmic rays, when they penetrate the earth’s atmosphere.

the water Cherkov detector (small water basins, 1.2 m deep; called "tanks")

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The small blue dots represent the tanks installed in the Pampas, and when an event occurs, it’s represented in yellow or green on this drawing.

For example, here we see the footprint of a cosmic ray, which was recorded at more than twenty stations. extending across 20 kilometres. And here we see that this cosmic ray has an energy of 2 followed by 19 zeros electron volts. It would heat one gram of water about one degree, not even enough to make a cup of coffee.

With telescopes tracking down tiny light sources and electron volts with endless zeros, this research has found new impetus in Argentina. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/know_l1/cosmic_rays.html

cosmic rays : are mostly pieces of atoms 原子:protons 質子, electrons 電子, and atomic nuclei 原子核which have had all of the surrounding electrons stripped during their high-speed (almost the speed of light) passage through the Galaxy

In astroparticle physics, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (UHECR) is a cosmic ray particle with a kinetic energy 動能 greater than 1018 eV, far beyond both its rest mass and energies typical of other cosmic ray particles.

An Extreme-energy cosmic ray (EECR) is an UHECR with energy exceeding 5×1019 eV (about 8 Joule), the so-called Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit (GZK limit).

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Documentary: : Science Bulletins- Aiming High—The Search for Ultra High-Energy Cosmic Rays

From outer space, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays reach Earth. These consist of single sub-atomic particles (protons or atomic nuclei), each with energy levels beyond 1018 eV (about the energy of a tennis ball traveling at 80 km/h[citation needed]). When such a single particle reaches Earth atmosphere, it has its energy dissipated by creating billions of other particles: electrons, photons and muons, all near the speed of light. These particles spread longitudinal (perpendicular to the single particle incoming route), creating a forward moving plane of particles, with higher intensities near the axis. Such an incident is called a "air shower". Passing through the atmosphere, this plane of particles creates UV light, invisible to the human eye, called the fluorescing effect, more or less in the pattern of straight lightning traces. These traces can be photographed at high speed by specialised telescopes, called Fluorescence Detectors, overlooking an area with at a slight elevation. Then, when the particles reach the Earth surface, they can be detected when they arrive in a water tank, where they cause Cherenkov effect: visible blue light. A sensitive photoelectric tube, can catch these impacts. Such a station is called a called water Cherenkov Detector or 'tank'. The Augen Observatory has both type of detectors covering the same area, which allows for very precise measurements.

 

 

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Malargue, Argentina – prefect height, flat region and population friendly.

water Cherenkov Detector or tank, totally 600 tanks, 3000 km2, 24 telecsope.

The Pierre Auger Observatory is an international cosmic ray observatory designed to detect ultra-high-energy cosmic rays: sub-atomic particles traveling at the speed of light and each with energies beyond 1018 eV. In Earth atmosphere, such particle interacts with air nuclei and produces various other particles. These effect particles (called an "air shower") can be detected and measured. But since these high energy particles have an estimated arrival rate of just 1 per km2 per century, the Auger Observatory has created a detection area of 3,000 km2 (1,200 sq mi) — the size of Rhode Island, or Luxembourg — in order to record a large number of these events. It is located in the western Mendoza Province, Argentina, near the Andes.  

17 countries, 300 physicists from nearly 100 institutions around the world, collect and analyse the measured data.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray

The history of cosmic ray research is a story of scientific adventure. For nearly a century, cosmic ray researchers have climbed mountains, soared in hot air balloons, and traveled to the far corners of the Earth in the quest to understand these energetic particles from space. They have solved some scientific mysteries—and revealed many more. With each passing decade, scientists have discovered higher-energy and increasingly more rare cosmic rays. The Pierre Auger Project is the largest scientific enterprise ever conducted to search for the unknown sources of the highest-energy cosmic rays ever observed.

 

Active galactic cores as one possible source of the particles[edit]

Interactions with blue-shifted cosmic microwave background radiation limit the distance that these particles can travel before losing energy; this is known as the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit or GZK limit.

The source of such high energy particles has been a mystery for many years. Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory show that ultra-high-energy cosmic ray arrival directions appear to be correlated with extragalactic supermassive black holes at the center of nearby galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN).[3] However, since the angular correlation scale used is fairly large (3.1 degrees) these results do not unambiguously identify the origins of such cosmic ray particles. The AGN could merely be closely associated with the actual sources, for example in galaxies or other astrophysical objects that are clumped with matter on large scales within 100 Mpc.[citation needed]

Some of the supermassive black holes in AGN are known to be rotating, as in the Seyfert galaxy MCG 6-30-15[8] with time-variability in their inner accretion disks.[9] Black hole spin is a potentially effective agent to drive UHECR production,[10] provided ions are suitably launched to circumvent limiting factors deep within the nucleus, notably curvature radiation[11] and inelastic scattering with radiation from the inner disk. Low-luminosity, intermittent Seyfert galaxies may meet the requirements with the formation of a linear accelerator several light years away from the nucleus, yet within their extended ion tori whose UV radiation ensures a supply of ionic contaminants.[12] The corresponding electric fields are small, on the order of 10 V/cm, whereby the observed UHECRs are indicative for the astronomical size of the source. Improved statistics by the Pierre Auger Observatory will be instrumental in identifying the presently tentative association of UHECRs (from the Local Universe) with Seyferts and LINERs.[13]

 

P.S.: further reading :

JEM-EUSO-1wvh76l

Discovering the sources of the particles’ acceleration could offer insight into high-energy astrophysics and the origins of the universe. The project also could reveal clues about “exotic physics,” such as supersymmetry and string theory.

With a grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the six teams will accomplish advance work necessary to launch a telescope mounted to the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) on the International Space Station (ISS).

That launch is scheduled for 2017 and represents the largest collaboration on the ISS, involving the U.S. and 12 other countries. In addition to UWM, the U.S. team, led by the University of Chicago, includes the Colorado School of Mines, Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), Vanderbilt University and the University of Alabama-Huntsville.

The goal of the international mission, called the Extreme Universe Space Observatory (JEM-EUSO), is to use the telescope to scan the night skies around Earth from space and record the luminous “tracks” left when these rare particles collide with the Earth’s atmosphere.

http://www5.uwm.edu/news/2013/03/05/uwm-joins-a-nasa-backed-search-for-cosmic-rays-2/#.UlUu2Dj4L1I

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uoc-nse030813.php

筆記:

1. 能量: 

每秒鐘, 地球每平方米有200條宇宙射線( 能量都比較低, 大概是Most cosmic rays, however, do not have such extreme energies; the energy distribution of cosmic rays peaks at 0.3 gigaelectronvolts (4.8×10−11 J).[9]) 撞擊.  而其間出現有超高能量的宇宙射線卻非常難找到, 它們是出現的次數比較少, 每天發生在每千方公里只有一次(They occur only once per square kilometer of sky per millennium.) , 而能量是Ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) are extremely energetic subatomic particles (mostly protons, but also some heavier atomic nuclei) with energies greater than 1015 eV. The record holder so far is a UHECR with an energy of 3×1020 eV – equivalent to a baseball thrown at 160 km/hr!

2.  觀察方法:

因為宇宙射線從外太空進入地球表面, 必經大氣層而發生撞擊後, 產生了 air shower ( 陣雨, the incident particle, which could be a proton, a nucleus, an electron, a photon, or (rarely) a positron, strikes a molecule in the air so as to produce many energetic hadrons. The unstable hadrons decay in the air speedily into other particles and electromagnetic radiation, which are part of the shower components.)

要觀察宇宙射線和陣雨 air shower, 在地面, The most advanced ground-based experiments to detect cosmic ray showers extend over several kilometres and consist of both Cherenkov detectors monitoring several large tanks of water for light produced by high-energy particles, and fluorescence detectors used to track the glow of the particle as it descends through the atmosphere.

auger-design-graphic

3. 來源:

經過經年的觀察, 我們發現了超高能宇宙射線最有可能是從活動星系核的超大質量旋轉黑洞而來的, 例如 in the Seyfert galaxy MCG 6-30-15[8] with time-variability in their inner accretion disks, 因為旋轉的動態黑洞是最大可能製造這些超高能宇宙射線.

The source of such high energy particles has been a mystery for many years. Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory show that ultra-high-energy cosmic ray arrival directions appear to be correlated with extragalactic supermassive black holes at the center of nearby galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN).[3] However, since the angular correlation scale used is fairly large (3.1 degrees) these results do not unambiguously identify the origins of such cosmic ray particles. The AGN could merely be closely associated with the actual sources, for example in galaxies or other astrophysical objects that are clumped with matter on large scales within 100 Mpc.[citation needed]

Some of the supermassive black holes in AGN are known to be rotating, as in the Seyfert galaxy MCG 6-30-15[8] with time-variability in their inner accretion disks.[9] Black hole spin is a potentially effective agent to drive UHECR production,[10] provided ions are suitably launched to circumvent limiting factors deep within the nucleus, notably curvature radiation[11] and inelastic scattering with radiation from the inner disk. Low-luminosity, intermittent Seyfert galaxies may meet the requirements with the formation of a linear accelerator several light years away from the nucleus, yet within their extended ion tori whose UV radiation ensures a supply of ionic contaminants.[12] The corresponding electric fields are small, on the order of 10 V/cm, whereby the observed UHECRs are indicative for the astronomical size of the source. Improved statistics by the Pierre Auger Observatory will be instrumental in identifying the presently tentative association of UHECRs (from the Local Universe) with Seyferts and LINERs.[13]

4. 最新消息:

NASA 將會更大的資源去觀察這些超高能宇宙射線

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http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-03/uoc-nse030813.php

Auger combines two techniques for observing cosmic rays. One technique consists mostly of large plastic water tanks, which serve as ground detectors that measure the shape of the shower. Spaced at one-mile intervals, the tanks occasionally intercept a particle from the atmospheric cascade generated by cosmic rays. The particles produce a flash as they cross from air into water. Electronics in the dark tanks detect the light and radios the information to a central station.

The second technique involves four infrared telescopes that detect ultraviolet light emissions generated in the atmosphere by cosmic rays. "You not only see the fluorescence on the ground, but you see the whole shower developing on the atmosphere," Olinto explained.

The Auger telescopes look straight up to the top of the atmosphere, approximately 40 kilometers (24.8 miles) high. "If you go to the International Space Station with the exact same technique and you look down, you can see a lot more of the atmosphere because now you're 400 kilometers up," Olinto said. "With a 60-degree opening angle, which we are designing, you can see instantaneously a hundred times the Auger area."

Olinto views the Extreme Observatory as the first step toward using the entire Earth atmosphere for studying subatomic particle interactions at energies far exceeding what the most powerful man-made accelerator at the Large Hadron Collider can currently produce. "In my opinion it's the way to the future," she said.