Auger Project Seeks to Study Highest Energy Cosmic Rays

FEB 01, 1997

Whave no idea how protons can get accelerated to energies above 10²⁰ eV, but they occasionally do. Existing air‐shower arrays have seen less than a dozen in 35 years.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881679

Bertram M. Schwarzschild

Fifty‐nine years ago, Pierre Auger discovered the extensive air showers generated by high‐energy cosmic rays when he saw that two Geiger counters several hundred meters apart in the Alps were recording coincident counts. Five years from now, if the funding is forthcoming, a pair of $3000 {km}^{2}$ air‐shower detector arrays bearing his name will begin their concerted assault on the greatest remaining mystery posed by cosmic rays. The Pierre Auger Project, a collaboration of physicists and astronomers from 40 institutions in 19 countries, plans to have one array in Utah monitoring the northern sky while an identical array in the high desert of western Argentina keeps watch over the southern sky.

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