Where Is the Fat Proton From?

Spread over miles of desert near Albuquerque, shallow disks of special plastic material bake in the sun. Connected by wire to a central laboratory, they are scintillometers set out to watch for enormously powerful cosmic rays that smack into atoms in the high atmosphere and, as a result of the crash, spray the earth's surface with millions of subatomic particles. Despite the minute size of his quarry, Physicist John Linsley of M.I.T., who operates the ray trap, reported a tremendous catch: a shower of 50 billion particles.

According to Linsley's calculations, the primary ray that caused all the ruckus must have had 100 billion billion electron-volts of energy--three billion times the power of man's biggest atom smashers. If the cosmic-ray invader consisted of only one proton, as Linsley believes, its fierce energy must have made it weigh 100 billion times as much as a normal earthly proton.

Where did the fat proton with its great cargo of energy come from? Cosmic rays are generally believed to be charged particles that have been speeded up by magnetic fields that are known to exist be tween the stars. But though this theory serves well enough for ordinary rays, the Milky Way galaxy to which the sun and its planets belong lacks magnetism strong enough to load 10^2DEG electron-volts on a lone proton. Nothing else in the galaxy, such as an exploding supernova, could do the job either.

Dr. Linsley believes that his fat proton must have come from some turbulent galaxy in far-distant space, where great forces exist that could give it the energy that it carried to earth. In the past, cosmic-ray scientists have only speculated about such turbulent galaxies, but radio astronomers have recently found a host of likely candidates. They seem to have blown up in some mysterious way and are giving off vast amounts of radio waves (TIME, Dec. 14). Dr. Linsley suspects that his fat proton may have got its speed and energy in one of these enormous explosions that involved billions of stars. If so, that proton traveled toward the earth at nearly the speed of light, perhaps for billions of years.

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