Talk:Cosmic ray

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[edit] Headline text

I'm pretty sure all or nearly all NASA articles are public domain, so it's fine to upload it, but please, give credit where it's due. --Larry Sanger

Cosmic rays were initially considered to come from some source other than the Sun. This was because the Sun was thought to emit little but visible light, and, of course, cosmic rays are isotropic and would arrive at Earth from all directions.

So what? Does all cosmic radiation originate from the sun? Why does it come from different directions, then?

That is not at all clear. -- malbi

This appears to have been changed to "Cosmic rays originate from energetic processes on the Sun all the way to the farthest reaches of the visible universe" but this still isn't entirely clear. The processes are on the sun all the way to the farthest reaches of the universe, or the particles originate from the sun all the way to the farthest reaches of the universe? Both? Is all of this type of radiation called cosmic rays? Roggg 14:03, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

If in the future, if cosmic rays were being used as Compact Disks(CD's), they will store over 10 gigabytes of information.

Apart from the grammar ("if in the future, if") this doesn't really tell me anything—how would one use cosmic rays as a storage medium? I assume the choice of CDs is arbitrary, as I don't see any immediate similarities between CDs and cosmic rays—if it is, the sentence could be rewritten to something like "If one were to use cosmic rays as a storage medium by (insert explanation here), one would be able to store approximately 10 gigabytes of information (per some unit).

This being the only content in the paragraph "Cosmic rays in tehnology" also seems to imply that use of cosmic rays as a storage medium is being seriously considered, if it isn't, perhaps it could be moved to something like "fun facts". -- 83.109.4.202

I must say, I agree with "malbi": the sentence "This was because the Sun was thought to emit little but visible light, and, of course, cosmic rays are isotropic and would arrive at Earth from all directions." is not clear.

Just today (November 3, 2004) there has been much learned about cosmic rays (see Reuters - "An international team of astronomers believe they have solved a mystery that has been perplexing scientists for 100 years -- the origin of cosmic rays.") I hope a knowledgable person in this area will incorporate information from this research soon. Thanks, Don Bailey, Colorado, USA

Why aren't these types of cosmic rays merged? lysdexia 19:40, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] cosmic rays are from the cosmos (not the sun)

How can a particle from the sun be called cosmic? These four sources appear to be fictious.

The term "cosmic radiation" does get used for solar radiation. When it was named, people didn't know where it was from, just that it was somewhere other than earth. dsws 15:40, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, see the Wiki on solar cosmic rays for more on this. Extra solar system cosmic rays (ie, rays from the cosmos) are called galactic cosmic rays, go figure. Even though some of them are probably from not from our galaxy.

All of this is important for interplanetary flight, BTW. If they all came from the sun, you could just make a long skinny ship, put the astronauts in the nose, and keep it pointed with the rear at the sun all the time to greatly increase your effective shielding. But that doesn't work as well as you'd think, because at least half of the cosmic radiation comes from all directions (except during solar storms, when it really does mostly from from the direction of the sun). So interplanetary astronauts will do the long skinny ship trick, but they have a BIG shielding problem. It takes 5 to 10 meters of water equivalent in hydrogen (which needs to BE water or polyethylene, etc) to shield from this stuff. If you have to have that ALL around you most of the time, that makes for very cramped quarters in your wake cycles. SBHarris 03:57, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Lighting

I wouldn't say "it is now considered likely" in this passage because it doesn't say who considers it likely... since it isn't physicists. It is a cool idea, but none of the experiments I have heard of that test this theory have been conclusive enough to say "likely". This section should be made to sound more like a cool new idea than basic particle physics. Also, a "relativistic process" should be re-written to include the exact physical process since... well, what does a "relativistic process" mean? The only thing relativistic are the particles due to their energies.

219.95.231.166 05:40, 17 March 2007 (UTC)amirul firdaus haslina== source for Cosmic Rays in Fiction addition? ==

Is there a source for the assertion about them appearing commonly in fiction because of metaphysical connotations of the word "cosmic"...? -- SCZenz 13:34, 27 January 2006 (UTC) i think source are not appearly friction that cause metaphysical but it cause by physical.. in my opinion.. cosmic can cause biologest efect

[edit] Cosmic Ray History

The story behind the naming of cosmic radiation goes something like this. Back in the 1900s scientists were just starting to explore radiation but had a problem. There seemed to be more radiation in the environment than they could account for given their knowledge of the natural sources of radiation.

A scientist by the name of Victor hess took a electroscope up to ~17000 feet (without oxygen!) and noted that the amount of radiation increased as he climbed. This suggested the radiation was from outer space and was eventually dubbed cosmic radiation.

Balloons are actually used today to continue to study cosmic radiation too - though they are alot bigger and reach much greater heights than Victor Hess did. Some more information is avaliable on them here:

    http://www.nsbf.nasa.gov/
That information is already in the article:
Cosmic rays, also known as cosmic particles, were initially believed to originate in radioactive isotopes in the ground. This theory was disproven in 1912 by Victor Hess, who in 1936 received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work. Hess used electroscope measurements taken at different altitudes from a hot air balloon to conclude that the radiation was cosmic in origin. Hess further showed that the Sun could not be the primary source of cosmic rays by taking balloon measurements during a 1912 solar eclipse.
-- Xerxes 16:19, 24 February 2006 (UTC)


[edit] List of doomsday scenarios

Could use votes to save this article, thanks MapleTree 22:19, 28 September 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Biological Effects

Can someone add any relevant research regarding biological effects of cosmic rays? Perhaps rays within some energy ranges can cause biological mutations. ♥ Yobani n Dulce ♥

Cosmic rays are a good fraction of the ambient radiation that human beings are exposed to in their daily lives. I should hopefully be able to find a source on this somewhere. -- SCZenz 01:12, 24 October 2006 (UTC)


Cosmic rays and cloud formation is not clear yet. Article should reflect that.

No meaningful relationship is found between cosmic ray intensity and cloud cover over tropical and extratropical land areas back to the 1950s. The high cosmic ray-cloud cover correlation in the period 1983–1991 over the Atlantic Ocean, the only large ocean area over which the correlation is statistically significant, is greatly weakened when the extended satellite data set (1983–1993) is used. Cloud cover data from ship observations over the North Atlantic, where measurements are denser, did not show any relationship with solar activity over the period 1953–1995, though a large discrepancy exists between ISCCP D2 data and surface marine observations. Our analysis also suggests that there is not a solid relationship between cosmic ray flux and low cloudiness as proposed by Marsh and Svensmark [2000 ]. "JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 107, NO. D14, 4211, doi:10.1029/2001JD000560, 2002 "

[edit] Cosmic Rays & RAM Soft Errors

Should include that cosmic rays cause soft errors in RAM. - MSTCrow 05:01, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cosmic Rays & Cloud formation NPOV

The following from a comment on MeFi:

heh.
so, the wikipedia article on cosmic rays has a section on cloud formation and cosmic rays, which plugs a svensmark article.
the section was added by 134.117.141.44 in a big glut of entries about global warming, on october 24 2006. that is eight days after the realclimate article that rycee linked to was published. that IP's location can be traced to ottawa, ON.
ottawa is the home of jan veizer, one of a list of scientists who oppose the global warming consensus.
much of the evidence in the svensmark article i linked to above comes from an article by vezier.
it's all so sordid and tacky. nor is it the behavior of an honest, objective mind. i don't know if it throws the conclusions into question or not; but it certainly makes me wonder. i have a really hard time accepting this as completely unbiased.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 4:27 AM PST on February 22

Taken together with "Cosmic rays and cloud formation is not clear yet. Article should reflect that.", above, it looks as likely that someone is trying to push a (probably global worming) point of view.

--Tagishsimon (talk) 13:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] galactic cosmic ray article plagiarized

The galactic cosmic ray article was plagiarized from a nasa page, as discussed on its talk page. It doesn't matter if the nasa page was public domain; it's still plagiarism if proper credit isn't given. I've deleted the plagiarized part, and started a fresh rewrite. The article is currently unbalanced, since the bulk of it is the section that I wrote on radiation hazards for crewed interplanetary travel. Also, although I'm a physicist, I'm not an expert on cosmic rays, so I may have some of my facts wrong. I would like to encourage any experts on cosmic rays to see if they can pitch in and improve the new, non-plagiarized version of the galactic cosmic ray article.--207.233.86.101 23:58, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Would it not have been simpler to give it proper credit than to put out a call to rewrite it? --Tagishsimon (talk)

[edit] Real Climate as a source

Real Climate is a blog, I do not think it should be used as a source. If there is a journal, newspaper, or magazine article cited in the blog, then go ahead and use the journal newspaper or magazine article that makes the statement, but I think blogs generally fall short as sources. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by --Theblog 19:09, 19 March 2007 (UTC)Theblog (talk • contribs) 19:09, 19 March 2007 (UTC).

Since no one has argued Real Climate is an appropriate source, I will remove referenced sections. --Theblog 16:19, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Sorrry, I missed your comment. RC is used as WP:RS elsewhere, I don't see why it shouldn't be here William M. Connolley 16:20, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't believe blogs meet the source standards, Real Climate is a blog, I checked the articles referenced and they don't reference journal articles or such, which would be appropriate to reference to. There is obviously some criticism of the theory out there, but Real Climate does not reference them and is not an appropriate source.--Theblog 16:25, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
I think Real Climate would not qualify as a source due to WP:SPS:
Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason, self-published books, personal websites, and blogs are largely not acceptable as sources.
Self-published material may be acceptable when produced by a well-known, professional researcher (scholarly or non-scholarly) in a relevant field. These may be acceptable so long as their work has been previously published by reliable third-party publications. However, exercise caution: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so.
The quotations in question as far as I can find out have not been previously published by a reliable third-party publication. --Theblog 16:37, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
This has been discussed elsewhere a lot. Certainly there is no blanket ban on blog entries. See Talk:The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle#Be_aware_of_WP:SPS for example William M. Connolley 16:43, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Umm okay, run with it, I think you're opening a can of worms though and their are published sources that discuss the subject in context that could be quoted. --Theblog 22:19, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
LOL I just realize William M. Connolley is contributor at real climate, self promote much? --Theblog 22:21, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Clouds and cosmic rays

Peterlewis reverted me over this [1]. The 2006 expt was a thing in a basement; it didn't make clouds at all, nor even water droplets. There are many many missing steps between this and real cloud effects William M. Connolley 22:11, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ongoing experiment at CERN

Regarding the role of cosmic rays in cloud formation (thus, climate change) there are a series of experiments going on at CERN. Preliminary results will be available shortly.

http://public.web.cern.ch/public/Content/Chapters/Spotlight/SpotlightCloud-en.html

--Jurgenborg 09:16, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

The assertion in tthe article: Whether cosmic rays are correlated with climate or not, they have been regularly measured by the neutron monitor at Climax Station (Colorado) since 1953 and show no long term trend. No trend = no explanation for current changes makes your "thus, climate change" unlikely. --Tagishsimon (talk)
I certainly wasn't suggesting a direct connection between cosmic rays and climate change. However one cannot exclude cosmic rays being one of the countless variables that have some bearing on climate. The 'unlikely' still merits attention. Or at least that's what they think at cern: 'CERN experiment looks at cosmic rays, clouds and climate'.
Kindly, can you post a link to the data quoted. Thanks.
--Jurgenborg 09:09, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Cosmic rays cause global warming?

Hasn't that been totally debunked?72.78.154.17 (talk) 21:04, 11 May 2008 (UTC)