The Sky's Not the Limit: China Builds Huge Observatory to Study Cosmic Rays

The high altitude observatory will cost more than one billion yuan [$157 million], and will study cosmic rays in China's southwest Sichuan Province.

China is building a high-altitude observatory in the Garze Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China, which will be able to detect cosmic rays over an area of one million square meters.

"With an acute gamma ray detector, it is the world's second most expensive cosmic ray observatory, after the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica," said Cao Zhen, a research fellow with China's Institute of High Energy Physics [IHEP], which will run the cosmic ray observatory.

The IHEP and the local Garze government have agreed a one billion yuan [$157 million] contract to build the observatory, China's second after the Yangbajain cosmic rays monitoring station in Tibet.

It will be capable of detecting rays with an energy of between one billion trillion and 10,000 billion trillion volts, and located on Haizi Mountain in Garze, which has an altitude of 4760 meters; the intensity of the rays increases with altitude.

China to build high altitude observatory in SW China's Sichuan to monitor cosmic rays http://t.co/0Vm4sWjYYV pic.twitter.com/p3XnrieI9S

— People's Daily,China (@PDChina) 11 сентября 2015

Cosmic rays are high energy charged particles, which travel at nearly the speed of light and strike the Earth from all directions beyond its atmosphere. Most of the particles, 89 percent, are protons in the form of hydrogen nuclei, but ten percent are nuclei of helium and one percent is made up of heavier nuclei, up to uranium, the heaviest naturally-occurring element.

The rays were discovered in 1912 by Austrian physicist Victor Hess, who took a series of balloon flights to measure radiation in the atmosphere, and concluded that penetrating radiation was entering the atmosphere from above, and not from the rocks of the Earth, as previously thought.