From left, Aspen High School physics teacher Marc Whitley shows students Jeff Anderson and Will Hyman how cosmic rays can be recorded with a wavelength shifting optical fiber at the Snowmass Area Large-scale Time-coincidence Array (SALTA), a weeklong workshop.  

Local students will be searching for mysterious extragalactic, cosmic rays over the next several years, thanks to a donation of sophisticated equipment and an Internet link with the University of Nebraska.

Using two-foot-by-two-foot plastic ray-capture panels and light counters, valued at about $5,000 for each school, Aspen, Basalt and Roaring Fork high school students will carry out an important scientific experiment. The students will be reporting "hits" from high-energy rays penetrating the atmosphere from outer space and looking for signs of elusive "super-rays" that originate from somewhere beyond our galaxy, the Milky Way.

A cosmic ray is "a stream of atomic nuclei of extremely penetrating character that enter the earth's atmosphere from outer space at speeds approaching that of light," according to "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary."

Before the students can set up the cosmic-ray detectors, they must invest some sweat equity reconditioning the panels to increase their accuracy at a weeklong Snowmass workshop. The workshop, which brings students from Colorado and Illinois together to learn the basic science related to cosmic rays, is running in conjunction with the international particle physics conference at Snowmass.

"This could be really cool. It's not just a lab. It's bigger and more important," Jeff Anderson, a senior at Aspen High School attending the workshop, said Monday.

Aspen High School physics teacher Marc Whitley said there is plenty of student interest in physics, which he teaches with more emphasis on the "hands-on" and conceptual basis than the mathematical. He said he hopes the cosmic-ray project will create additional student interest in science and that students will want to participate.

Physics professor Jeff Wilkes, from the University of Washington, said the cosmic-ray counters would be much more accurate than in an earlier experiment because "they didn't have the free student labor to fine-polish the edges of the plastic panels," referring to the plastic ray-capture panels.

Using the Internet to collect cosmic-ray hits from scores of schools around the country will magnify the importance of the project, according to Gregory Snow, a physics professor at the University of Nebraska. The recording of the exact location and time of the hits, to within billionths of a second using Global Positioning satellites, will allow exact coordination among the reporting schools.

"If detectors light up in Aspen and Basalt or Basalt and Carbondale at the same time from a super-energetic cosmic ray, that could be a publishable event," Snow said.

He explained that a few times a year, extra-energetic cosmic rays are able to force their way past a gravity halo surrounding the Milky Way and hit the earth's atmosphere, where they create a shower of light and a cascade of sub-atomic particles. Those particles land on the earth's surface in a pancake-shaped area about 10 miles in diameter.

Most cosmic rays come from within the galaxy and are made up of pieces of hydrogen and helium atoms that have been ripped apart in dying-star explosions and catapulted out at incredible speeds. The inner-galaxy rays would only be detected at a single school site.

Where the "super-rays" come from and how they are formed is still a scientific mystery that the high school cosmic-ray project could help answer.

"So far it's pretty cool to be able to have fun with these gadgets and gizmos," said Roaring Fork High School graduate Ian Derrington.

As an entering freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Derrington will follow the cosmic trajectory, majoring in physics and math.