NASA Funds Galactic Cosmic Ray Origins Research

According to a recent announcement made by the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), astrophysicists at Washington University in St. Louis are the proud beneficiaries of a $3,225,740 research grant, which has been awarded to them so that they can speed up the designing and building stages of the Super-TIGER instrument. The Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (TIGER) has the sole purpose of being carried around the Antarctic, while collecting ultra-heavy galactic cosmic ray nuclei (nuclei belonging to atoms heavier than the Nickel element).

The grant, titled “Super-TIGER: A Very-Large-Area, High-Resolution Trans-Iron Cosmic Ray Investigation,” has been awarded to WU research professor of physics W. Robert Binns, PhD, and to the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences high-energy astrophysics group. Their mission is to ensure that the new instrument's test flight takes place no later than December 2012.

“The Super-TIGER experiment will be able to collect about 10 times as many particles as the TIGER experiment, enabling us to make precise abundance measurements of these very rare, heavy nuclei. These measurements will enable us to test the emerging model of cosmic ray origin in associations of massive stars,” Binns explains. The goal of the research, co-investigator Martin H. Israel, PhD, who is a UW physics professor, adds is to better understand the origin of cosmic rays, as well as the phenomena that give them so much energy.

According to previous theories, cosmic rays are generated in large groups of massive stars, known as OB associations. It's in these places that the rays are believed to be accelerated to their amazing speed, which is almost equal to that of light. Still, this theory requires further proof, and researchers need to understand how is it that elements found in interstellar grains of dust are accelerated to enormous speeds much more efficiently than those found in surrounding gas clouds.

The Washington University's cosmic ray astrophysics laboratory will be responsible for the construction of the new instrument, which the same team of scientists, engineers, technicians and graduate students that worked on the previous TIGER project will be attending. The new device will be four times larger than its predecessor and will almost reach the size of a pool table.