Hi, I'm Dallas Campbell and in this series of videos, we're going to be showing you how
to become a citizen scientist, taking part in real scientific experiments and helping
researchers make discoveries about the world and the universe beyond. And we're very lucky
today because we going to be looking at how to detect cosmic particles with your mobile
phone. I'm very lucky to be here with Dr Jo Jarvis from The Open University. And Dr Alex?
Maybe a doctor
I mean
One day
Maybe, maybe.
University of life, he's going to be our citizen scientist. Well, first of all, what is a cosmic
ray? It sounds very esoteric, it sounds very science-fiction. What are we talking about?
They are a bit.
Cosmic rays are really high energy particles that are raining down on our planet from space
all the time. They're passing through us right now.
OK.
Don't worry.
They're going through my
Yep, Yep don't worry they're not doing any harm at all.
I'm guessing they are not very big.
No, they're not. No, they're much, much smaller than sort of electrons and things that you
might be more familiar with but they carry huge amounts of energy with them.
So even though these particles are passing through me and tables and chairs and planets
how do we detect them because I presume they're going through the phone itself.
They all going through the phone itself yes absolutely. But the CCD chip that is in there
that you're actually taking your photo on
So this is from the camera bit
It's the camera. Yeah absolutely, that is that's really quite dense that's a very solid
piece of material.
Yeah.
So as the particles travel through that they actually leave a little bit of energy behind
and we see that as an image. As one maybe two pixels lit up.
So we're not seeing the particle itself, we're just seeing it's sort of trail
Exactly.
If you like. How is a mobile phone going to pick that up? How are we going to detect these
things?
Well, first what you need to do is pop an app on your phone, just like any other app.
And it's called CREDO detector.
Yeah.
And it will be using the camera on the back of your phone which you need to just cover-up.
What it is doing, I'll show you some statistics, there we go. So you can see the frames busy
counting up. So that is constantly taking pictures.
So this is a visual thing, this is a visual that's taking actual snapshots.
Absolutely.
Alex, here is the phone. I want you to do a little bit of citizen science for me and
see if you can detect a cosmic ray.
I shall start the detection. Go!
How often are they hitting because that camera lens is very, very small.
It is very small, yeah absolutely.
I guess the cosmic particle is also
It's also extremely small. Yeah, so if you were to work out you know the statistics of
you know a particle hitting your camera phone
Yeah
Then it's really quite small. Of course, there are millions and millions of phones like this
scattered across the planet.
And this is why it's a good citizen science project because everybody has a phone. So
everyone is carrying a particle detector
Absolutely, absolutely. We with the help of citizen scientists we have got a detector
the size of the planet.
Dr Alex, what have you detected? Have you come up with something?
Oh yes, that's quite a good two there.
OK, so that looks to the untrained eye, that looks like two splotches.
Yep, we've got, we've actually got two detections there.
So there's a two particles
Come in together
That has hit. And presumably, all this data is going to be passed on to someone so
Yeah absolutely
Two particles.
Yeah.
The question is though why do we care? I mean why collect all this data for what purpose?
They carry a huge amount of information for us. So from a sort of scientist perspective,
we can gather information about the Big Bang, where the universe and us originally came
from. They can potentially help to answer some of the fundamental questions such as
dark matter that you might have heard of and what it is. But also much, much closer to
home we're already aware of the fact we have to be a little bit cautious about what the
sun is up to in terms of exposing astronauts to danger and affecting communication satellites
things like that. We haven't really looked at the effect of cosmic rays.
Apart from now, Alex, I'm going to give you back this. Continue with your science. Jo,
thank you very much indeed for that. (WHISPERS) There's also the space invaders app on there
in case you want to do that.
There are loads more citizen science projects you can take part in from penguin spotting
in Antarctica to helping rescue teams target aid and resources during natural disasters.
Find out more on the citizen science website.