Want To Do A Little Astrophysics? This App Detects Cosmic Rays

App turns a smartphone into a pocket-sized cosmic ray detector

March 27, 2015 2:30 PM ET

Joe Palca

Smart phones contain a silicon chip inside the camera that might be used to detect rare, high energy particles from outer space.

J. Yang/Courtesy of WIPAC

Scientists in California are hoping to use your smart phone to solve a cosmic mystery. They're developing an app to turn your phone into a cosmic ray detector. If enough people install the app, the scientists think they'll be able to figure out once and for all what's producing the very energetic cosmic rays that occasionally hit the Earth.

"We were, of course, fiddling with our smart phones, and that's when we realized, 'Hold on a second, these smart phones can actually be used as particle detectors!' "

- Daniel Whiteson, physicist, University of California, Irvine

The project is the brainchild of physicists Daniel Whiteson at the University of California, Irvine, and his buddy Michael Mulhearn at the University of California, Davis. Both spend time in Switzerland, working on the giant particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider. Whiteson says the Large Hadron Collider, located in a tunnel beneath the Swiss-French border near Geneva, is so huge and so complicated that scientists must share their time on the collider.
"The two of us each work on these enormous collaborations of about 3,000 scientists," he says. "And while that's very interesting, and you a meet lot of sharp people, it's also nice sometimes to do a smaller project where you can be in control of what's happening."

That's where the smart phone comes in. Whiteson and his California pals, as well as new collaborator, Kyle Cranmer at New York University, are building an app that turns the CMOS chip in the phones camera into a particle detector. They're hoping millions of people all over the globe will download the app.
When a high energy cosmic ray hits the top of Earth's atmosphere, it creates a shower of new energetic particles.
"So if we have a bunch of users nearby each other, all running the app, they will all see hits in their phone, they'll see particles being detected by our app in their phone in the same moment," says Whiteson.
And by analyzing the distribution of the particle shower detected by the phones, Whiteson says, the astrophysicists will learn more about the high energy cosmic ray that produced the shower.
That's the idea, anyway.
Whiteson says the reaction from other astrophysicists to his scheme ranges from bemused to skeptical. But he thinks that's reasonable.
"We don't yet know if it's the best idea we ever had, or the silliest idea that we ever had," he says. "But one thing we do know is, it's one of the funnest to work on."

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