Professor Mulhearn invents cosmic ray detecting cell phone app
Every second, the Earth is being struck by cosmic rays, high energy particles that slam into the atmosphere. Understanding where they come from and how they're generated could provide information about some of the most energetic processes in the Universe. But Earth's atmosphere protects us from them, ensuring that they don't make it to the surface. Instead, we have to look for the shower of photons and particles that the cosmic rays create when they hit the atmosphere.