We register cosmic rays on your phone

An application for registering cosmic rays with the camera of your smartphone is available.

The project of the Distributed Electronic Observatory of Cosmic Rays has started. The project is led by the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center team. The application was conceived with the aim of helping to collect data on cosmic events that manifest themselves in the atmosphere of the Earth in the form of showers of cosmic rays.



Why it is needed:

Registration of these rays over a large area will help to establish a radiation source (not always of cosmic origin). It is unprofitable to build observatories for recording these events. they must occupy a very large area in order to establish that we have events generated by one source.



Information about the program itself, as well as all data collected at the moment, are available on the sitewipac.wisc.edu/deco . The data collected by the program is sent to the center for processing this data, then they are posted on the wipac.wisc.edu/deco/data page , and there is also a map of events recorded by the community: The



application must be downloaded at www.globalsensorweb.org/ota /GSW-DECO.apk ( for its work, the data logger www.globalsensorweb.org/ota/GSW-Datalogger.apk is required )

How it works:

The application uses the camera of your smartphone (no, I hope it does not send your photos to the NSA), it searches for randomly lit images, which take 1-2 seconds, illuminated pixels, if such bright pixels are found, the second stage of analysis is going on - a more complete data processing in order to make sure that this bright pixel is indeed an event of a cosmic scale :).

The DECO application can detect muons from cosmic rays, as well as electrons, gamma rays and alpha particles, which appear as a result of the decay of materials in small amounts found in the environment and in the material of your phone.

Work algorithm:

You turn on DECO for a day, certain events are collected per day (pictures are taken), before you start collecting events, the application needs to be calibrated to eliminate background noise.

Where to get:

While the application is only for Android. We follow the link that is given above, and a little lower on the site there is a link to download the application.

Download at www.globalsensorweb.org/ota/GSW-DECO.apk

PS It's strange that the application is not on Google Play, but just in case I checked it for viruses on virustotal - it’s clean.