Discover Cosmic Rays with your SmartPhone

This is one of the stories that I had to double check to make sure it wasn’t a hoax but it does check out. Here’s the background:

[R]esearchers from the University of California have drafted a paper in which they describe testing whether a smartphone camera can detect high energy photons and particles of the sort produced by cosmic rays. Testing with radioactive isotopes of radium, cobalt, and cesium showed that the detector easily picked up gamma rays (and you didn’t even have to point the phones at the source!). They also put a phone inside a lead box and showed that they could detect high energy particles. Finally, they took a phone up on a commercial flight and were able to obtain a particle track across the detector.

With everything looking good, they made some software, called CRAYFIS, for cosmic rays found in smartphones (why they didn’t add “and handhelds,” I’m not sure). When your phone is inactive and plugged in for charging, CRAYFIS monitors the camera, looking for signs of high-energy items striking the detector. The authors calculate that if they can get 1,000 active cell phones within a square kilometer, they’ll be able to detect nearly all of the high energy cosmic rays that strike the atmosphere above it despite the low efficiency of each individual detector.

You can find out more about the science and sign up your smartphone here.

There are now some 1.75 billion smartphone users in the world and soon there will be many more. That’s an astounding amount of computing power distributed over most of the world’s surface and it’s computing power that is capable of reaching out to the world around it to measure, monitor, test and connect.