Mysterious Comsic Rays Leave Scientists in the Dark

Imagine a burst of energy 100 million times greater than the greatest man made burst of energy ever created.  Charles Choi wrote the article, “Mysterious cosmic rays leave scientists in the dark,” that talks about how scientists have recently gained new evidence of this burst of energy named a, “Cosmic Ray.” A cosmic ray is a streak of subatomic particles across deep outer space.  University of Wisconsin professor and leader of the “IceCube” observatory preached how nature is very capable of doing this.  He followed by explaining, “There are basically only two ideas on how she does this — in gravitationally driven particle flows near the supermassive black holes at the centers of active galaxies, and in the collapse of stars to a black hole, seen by astronomers as gamma-ray bursts.”  More studies suggest that this ray can emit as much energy as the sun over its entire lifetime in a couple of minutes or even in a couple of seconds.  In the past scientists have believed that the cause of this rare event was due to gamma ray bursts but new evidence suggests that this is not the case.  The IceCube observatory has been the leading researcher on this topic over the past few years.  They created special detectors that can detect sub atomic particles passing through it in order to obtain neutrino astronomy data.  With this data they recently partially ruled out gamma rays as instigators of these cosmic rays.

            This recent news really connects to our lives as human beings.  This new evidence of cosmic rays enhances the gap in knowledge of what’s going to happen in our future.  I don’t know if it’s just me but I don’t really think these rays bode well for our planet.  The information and research that we have gathered on cosmic rays seems very nebulous to me.  What if these large bursts push our planet or another planet off their course.  If that were to happen then there could be collisions and that’s certainly not what we want to happen in the future.

            I thought that this article was very well written.  Choi made it easy to understand through his tone and word choice.  I really liked how he chose quotes that really fit the article.  The quotes went along with his argument smoothly.  Also I liked how he broke the article into sections.  This allowed for better understanding and allowed for me to keep up with the story.   One thing that I thought Choi could have done better was that he could have provided more research about past studies of cosmic rays.  Overall, I thought this was a very good article and a great read.  I recommend this article to anyone with a curious mind.

Choi, Charles Q. "Mysterious Cosmic Rays Leave Scientists in the Dark." Msnbc.com. Msnbc Digital Network, 18 Apr. 2012. Web. 18 Apr. 2012. <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47089794/ns/technology_and_science-space/>.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47089794/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.T49gTBxBRfA