The Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE) takes part in the creation of an interactive catalogue of cosmic rays  

The Galician Institute of High Energy (IGFAE), a centre run jointly by the University of Santiago de Compostela and the Galician autonomous government (Xunta de Galicia) and a member of the CIGUS Network, is participating in an international project to create an interactive catalogue of cosmic rays. Using data collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory (Argentina), one of the largest cosmic ray detectors in the world, researchers at the Galician centre compiled and analysed the events to produce a catalogue in which the most energetic cosmic rays observed can be consulted, together with their characteristics, arrival directions and their detectors.

One of the great mysteries in astroparticle physics is how particles, as they journey hundreds of millions of light years across the cosmos to Earth, can be accelerated with an energy up to ten million times higher that of protons in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider LHC, located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Observatories studying these rays include the Pierre Auger Observatory, which recently published a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series listing the top 100 most energetic cosmic rays detected between 2004 and 2020. The IGFAE catalogue was published as a complement to this study.  

Jaime Álvarez Muñiz, a researcher at the Galician Institute of High Energy (IGFAE), stressed the importance of the study on most energetic radiation, as it allows the identification of the most extreme and violent cosmic ray sources in the universe. “It is possible that their energy is obtained by feeding on objects such as supermassive black holes,” he stated.  

The Galician Institute of High Energy (IGFAE) and the University of Granada are the only two Spanish partners in this project, in which over 400 scientists, engineers and technicians from more than 90 institutions from 18 different countries have taken part. The IGFAE team of seven researchers that took part in this project played a crucial role in compiling, reconstructing and analysing the events included in the catalogue, thanks to their outstanding expertise in steep particle shower reconstruction. These showers are key to identifying the extremely high-energy neutrinos among all the cosmic particles bombarding the Earth, and provide the necessary information to determine which cosmic objects give rise to primary cosmic rays.