Citizen science: From the cosmos to the classroom

Citizen science tasks supply most of the people, or segments of that public equivalent to college college students, a possibility to participate in scientific analysis. The Excessive Power Occasions (EEE) Venture in Italy is a cooperation between particle physicists finding out cosmic rays and faculty college students, and their lecturers, all through the nation.

This has the dual goals of bringing cosmic ray analysis into faculties and organising a country-wide ‘open laboratory’ of particle detectors. One of many lead researchers from the EEE Venture consortium, Silvia Pisano of the Italian Centro Fermi and Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN, Rome, Italy, has summarized the outcomes from about 20 years of this mission in a brand new paper in The European Bodily Journal Plus .

Cosmic rays are high-energy particles that journey by way of space at practically the pace of sunshine; once they come into contact with the earth’s environment they produce a wide range of secondary particles that may be detected once they attain floor stage. One main cosmic ray can produce a bathe of such particles that fully covers a metropolis the scale of, as an illustration, Bologna. “There are nonetheless many open questions on these secondary particles, equivalent to the complete particulars of their vitality spectra,” explains Pisano.

The EEE community consists of about 60 detectors or “EEE telescopes” positioned throughout Italy, largely in excessive faculties. College students and their lecturers are concerned in all elements of the mission: set up and upkeep of the gear, knowledge assortment and evaluation, and disseminating the outcomes. “The peculiarity of an experiment designed on this manner is that it could actually search for correlations between occasions which are lots of of kilometers aside,” provides Pisano. She and her collaborators at the moment are planning to increase the community to incorporate extra faculties, together with some outdoors Italy.

One other ongoing growth is the design of a combination of gases for the detectors to exchange the highly effective greenhouse gasoline tetrafluoroethane; school students are concerned on this and different enhancements. “This experiment offers a novel setting for educating future generations within the observe of science,” Pisano concludes.