An international group of physicists announced plans Tuesday to build a $50 million, 1,600-square-mile net to catch elusive cosmic rays in the plains of southeastern Colorado.
Construction could begin as early as next year.
“This is great news for Colorado,” said Mike Beasley, executive director of the state Office of Local Affairs. “It puts us on the world stage for physics.”
The array of 1,600 water-tank detectors would stretch through parts of Baca, Bent and Prowers counties and help scientists understand the origin of the most high-energy particles known to science – “extremely energetic cosmic rays.”
Proving the existence of the powerful rays could challenge some of physics’ fundamental principles.
“There are theories that predict that we shouldn’t get rays of this high energy on Earth,” said University of Colorado physicist Patricia Rankin. “If they do exist, it’s a sign we need some new physics.”
The international team – which includes scientists from CU and Colorado State University and a University of Chicago Nobel laureate – picked the grasslands around Lamar as the best place in the Northern Hemisphere to search for cosmic rays.
The choice was made at a meeting in Orsay, France.
Although full funding has not yet been secured, state officials checked with international science and science-funding organizations.
“Everyone we talk to is confident the funds will come through,” said Evan Metcalf, an official with the state Office of Economic Development.
The state has committed $250,000 to Lamar Community College to help build a new project headquarters at the college and a visitor’s center.
The science group, known as the Pierre Auger Collaboration, is already midway through building a similar detector network near Mendoza, Argentina. The two sites would capture high-energy cosmic rays created by events in different parts of the universe.
A few of these rays have been detected in small experiments in Japan and at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.
“We don’t know where these things come from,” said Jim Sites, assistant dean for research at Colorado State University, one of several U.S. universities involved in the international group.
They might not even be real, some physicists contend.
Some naysayers argue that their colleagues made mistakes calculating the amount of energy in these rare events.
Other scientists say that while events such as exploding stars may blast cosmic rays toward the Earth, there is no known event that could create or propel these highest energy cosmic rays.
The two large-scale cosmic-ray networks aim to settle the debate.
In southern Colorado, researchers would place covered tanks of highly purified water, about 5 feet high and 12 feet in diameter, on the corners of rural sections, one-mile squares usually bordered by roads, CSU’s Sites said.
Equipment inside the plastic tanks would detect when a cosmic ray streaks through the water, creating a subtle flash of light.
The detectors would be solar- powered, Sites said, and most of them would be on private land.
Jan Anderson, executive director of Southeast Colorado Enterprise Development, said she and her colleagues have spent the past two years signing up landowners to help out with the project, and she was ecstatic on Tuesday that their efforts helped win the bid for Colorado.
“Now we will have Denver folks bringing their schoolchildren here for science field trips,” Anderson said. “It used to be the other way around.”
CU’s Rankin said she sees the project as a bit of a gamble, given that researchers aren’t certain about the existence of the cosmic rays. “It’s speculative, but the potential payoff if this is true is extremely high,” she said.
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-820-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
