100 years of cosmic radiation
- One of Hess' balloon rides in 1912
Victor Hess-Year 2012
Exactly one hundred years ago, the Austrian physicist Victor Franz Hess performed several balloon flights and measured that natural radioactivity increases with height. He discovered that particles from space are constantly hitting the earth: the cosmic radiation. Victor Hess received for this discovery the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1936.
To mark the 100th anniversary the following events are planned:
- commemorative opening of the Victor Hess-year (19 March)
- symposium in Innsbruck and Pöllau (Website)
- Start of a stratospheric ballon to measure cosmic radiation
As planned for the beginning of April, the LHC accelerator has gone into normal operation. It is now colliding particles at an energy of 8 TeV and enables the experiments to restart their data taking.
On Monday, March 26th we visited the Austrian federal state of Burgenland for the first time with our Hands-on physics programme.
The Large Hadron Collider will resume operation shortly, after its scheduled winter shutdown. The first Protons will be injected in mid-March, and collisions will take place in early April. The energy of the particle beams will reach a new record value. Their intensity will also be increased.