Physicists Recreate Cosmic Ray Collisions with Earth's Atmosphere at CERN

An international team of physicists has used CERN's Large Hadron Collider to recreate high-energy cosmic ray collisions with Earth's atmosphere. By introducing oxygen beams for the first time in the LHC and colliding them with proton beams, researchers achieved the world's first controlled-lab measurements of these 'cosmic rainstorms'. The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, offer a clearer understanding of interstellar particles and their interactions with our planet's gases.