This is from Stephen Hawking's site:

Earth is continually pelted by high-energy particles coming mostly from beyond the solar system. These cosmic rays, as they are known, typically travel at speeds 90 to 99 percent that of light. Protons constitute the vast majority of cosmic rays, although the nuclei of helium and heavier elements make up roughly 10 percent and a few percent come as electrons and positrons. Astronomers suspect that most of these particles form in supernova explosions, which blast them out into the galaxy.

When cosmic rays reach Earth, they smash into the nuclei of atoms in the atmosphere, giving rise to a host of secondary particles. These eventually reach Earth's surface, where they can overwhelm detectors designed to pick up the subtle signatures of neutrinos and other subatomic particles suspected of contributing to dark matter. That's why physicists usually shield such detectors by burying them deep underground.

There is a very large cosmic ray observatory in Colorado. It is about near where I live. The detectors are above ground and spread over a large area.

These detectors are not underground as stated above. There are two observatories of this kind in the world. I think the other one is in Argentina.

Argentina: http://www.auger.org/
Southeast Colorado: http://www.augernorth.org/

What are Cosmic Rays: (Cut and pasted from the site)

Cosmic rays are usually protons (but can also be heavier nuclei) which are accelerated by dynamic magnetic fields such as those on the sun, in solar wind, and fields blasted out by supernova explosions in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Cosmic rays can have a wide range of energies, and those with lower energy levels are well understood.

Scientists have various ways of expressing energy levels, but the unit of the electron volt (eV) is used to measure energy possessed by these cosmic particles. (Their energy could also be expressed in more familiar units of energy like calories, BTU, or kilowatt-hours.) These particles could possess energy in the range from 1012 to 1020 eV. For those not accustomed to using exponents or scientific notation, 1012 would be equivalent to a 1 followed by 12 zeroes, or 1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion). The weakest cosmic rays have an energy of about 109 eV or 1,000,000,000 (one billion) electron volts, which is about the minimum energy needed for a particle to get from beyond the solar system through the magnetized solar wind. Just a few thousand particles with energy of 1012 eV would have enough energy to power an ordinary 60-watt household light bulb for an hour.

For the higher energy cosmic rays, there are few existing explanations and there is no scientific consensus about where they originate from. Scientists have built special particle accelerators to duplicate these cosmic ray particles, but the highest energies they have achieved are around 1012 eV. The Auger Observatory is designed to study particles in the range of 1019 or 1020 eV, which have around ten million times more energy than the particles produced in particle accelerators on Earth. One of these particles carries the equivalent energy of a baseball being thrown by a professional pitcher, a hockey puck being slap-shot at the net or a soccer ball being kicked at the goal. It does not seem like a great amount of energy to us, but it is packed into an object 100 trillion times smaller than those just mentioned. The Observatory will gather the data needed to solve the puzzle of where they originate - hopefully giving us insight into the process(es) the may create them also. Until it is solved, it will remain one of the greatest mysteries of our universe.

'Just a few thousand particles with energy of 1012 eV would have enough energy to power an ordinary 60-watt household light bulb for an hour."


there are some who have wanted to harvest the energy of 'the field' for a long time now...

The most energetic particles in the
universe have a message for us.
The gigantic Pierre Auger Southern
Observatory, still under construction
in Argentina, is already trying to
decipher it. By Davide Castelvecchi

http://www.auger.org/observatory/outreach/let_it_rain.pdf


(I haven't read it yet...)


This part is interesting:

Scientists don’t know what to make of such
data. No ordinary star could generate these
energies, and even the most powerful objects in
the universe don’t look like plausible candidates.
“To the extent that we think we understand
astrophysical objects, it doesn’t seem possible,”
says Jim Cronin of the University of Chicago

there's a lot of things going on in the cosmos that isn't understood..and it is affecting the planet

Part of the article

.....But what if, instead, the map shows a shapeless spread of dots, the way it happens at lower energies?

If the spread looks truly uniform,
then something could be severely wrong in
our current understanding of fundamental
physics, scientists say. Some of the proposed
explanations border on the exotic: Perhaps
even Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which
prescribes the rules for the GZK cutoff, could
need some mending, according to studies
by Sidney Coleman and Sheldon Glashow of
Harvard University and others.

"The coming data explosion

Whatever Auger discovers, it will dramatically
change cosmic ray science, and perhaps more.

Although it’s still incomplete, Auger is already
the largest observatory in the world, and the first
major cosmic ray experiment south of the
equator. It has accumulated as much data as any
previous ultra-high-energy cosmic ray experiment, and faster than expected.

“We’re getting far more out of our detector than we ever
imagined,” says Fermilab’s Mantsch. The collaboration also pursues its proposal to build a twin in North America, where most galaxies in
the Local Group would be visible. "

(The twin observatory is the one they built practically in my back yard!)<---------------Colorado