Scientist to unveil mystery of ultra-high energy cosmic rays

Enjoy the lecture, "Chasing Cosmic Bullets: The Pierre Auger Experiment" by Angela Olinto of University of Chicago at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 27 in Ramsey Auditorium at Fermilab, off Pine Street in Batavia. Tickets are $5; call (630) 840-2787. For information, visit www.fnal.gov/culture.

The most energetic particles in the universe are ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Millions of times more powerful than anything produced by man-made accelerators, their origin has been a mystery for about a century. Over the last several years, an international collaboration of 17 countries joined forces to solve this mystery by building the Pierre Auger Observatory. Spread over 3,000 square kilometers in western Argentina, the observatory was recently inaugurated. During its construction, the observatory gathered enough of these rare particles to find the first clues to their origin. The most energetic of these particles tend to point to cosmologically nearby galaxies that host super massive black holes at their centers. Over the coming years, scientists working on Auger will be carefully studying these most extreme particles, learning where they come from and what they are made of in order to solve the long-standing mystery of their origin and how they are accelerated to the highest energies ever observed.

Olinto is a professor in the department of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, where she is also a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. Her research interests are in theoretical astrophysics, particle and nuclear astrophysics, and cosmology. Her recent work has focused on the highest energy cosmic rays, indirect signatures of particle dark matter, and cosmological effects of magnetic fields. She is a member of the Pierre Auger Collaboration now planning for the next generation Auger Observatory to be built in Southeast Colorado.