What happens when a particle from deep space hits the Earth's atmosphere? And how do scientists actually find out? A group of secondary school students explored these questions after being invited by the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences (FZU) and the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering at CTU (FJFI) to a full-day seminar on astroparticle physics.
The event was opened by FZU Director Michael Prouza and FJFI Dean Václav Čuba, who explained to students why astroparticle physics is such an interesting field and why there is something in it for everyone.
From the mysteries of the universe to neural networks
The main part of the morning was devoted to two lectures. The first speaker was Margita Kubátová, a doctoral student at FJFI, whose research focuses on muons, a specific type of particle that is produced when cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere.
Muons are important because they carry information about what cosmic rays are made of. To study them, Kubátová uses artificial neural networks, which help process the large amounts of data collected by the detectors at the Pierre Auger Observatory.
Her lecture was followed by Petr Trávníček, head of the astroparticle physics department at FZU, who has spent many years studying cosmic rays, particles that travel to us from space carrying extraordinarily high amounts of energy.
He began by introducing students to the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, explaining how scientists detect such particles and what their measurements can reveal. Trávníček is a member of several major international projects, including the Pierre Auger Observatory, the Cherenkov Telescope Array gamma-ray observatory, and the SST-1M experiment.
After each talk, students had time to ask questions. The discussions were lively, and to encourage students to engage, the best question was rewarded with a book each time.
Scientists for a day
The afternoon practical session was led by Alena Bakalová, who organised and coordinated the entire event on behalf of FZU. Students were handed real data from the surface stations of the Pierre Auger Observatory, a vast scientific experiment spread across the Argentine pampas, designed to detect cosmic rays at the highest energies.
Their task was to reconstruct a cosmic ray shower from the data and determine the energy and arrival direction of the primary cosmic ray particle. They were then to select events with energies above 8 EeV and finally evaluate their results.
The seminar was followed by a video conference directly with the Pierre Auger Observatory, giving students a glimpse behind the scenes of a real scientific facility. For many of them, the whole day was the first opportunity to speak directly with scientists and experience what science is really like.
“We are happy that the fourth year of Auger Masterclasses came together so well, and that so many talented students from across the country joined us. It was nice to watch them discuss, work through the data and engage with science the way real researchers do. We hope they leave with not just new knowledge, but a real enthusiasm for physics," said Alena Bakalová, lead organiser from the Institute of Physics.
