A UW-Madison assistant professor developed a smartphone application capable of capturing cosmic rays entering Earth’s atmosphere, turning phones into pocket research devices.
UW-Madison physicist Justin Vandenbroucke designed the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory app, also known as DECO, to detect light particles that are constantly coming into the planet’s atmosphere, according to a university release.
“The apps basically transform the phone into a high-energy particle detector,” Vandenbroucke said in the release.
Cosmic rays are particles smaller than atoms that scientists believe originate from astronomical phenomena such as black holes and exploding stars.
The app will work by using the smartphone’s camera to detect muons, which are secondary particles produced when cosmic rays crash into the atmosphere.
Vandenbroucke developed DECO for educational purposes, noting he hopes high school teachers will use it in their curricula.
In order to detect and record the particles, the app must be downloaded and the phone’s camera lens covered with duct tape. Then, the phone can be set anywhere and it will begin to document images.
“It would be great to get students and the public interested in gathering data and understanding the particles around them, things they ordinarily don’t get a chance to see,” Vandenbroucke said in the release.
Scientists can learn even more about these cosmic occurrences by pairing the data collected by DECO to other more advanced experiments through the app’s data logger, which records time, location and observations from each event.
With enough people using DECO to capture muons, it could eventually become an important “citizen science” project, according to the release.
