Once NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this week, the mission is expected to explore the cosmos by surveying hundreds of millions of galaxies, capturing the sky in detail hundreds of times faster than even the Hubble Space Telescope.

“This enormous field of view will allow us to map astronomical objects in a way that we previously couldn’t,” said David Weinberg, a Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University. “These better measurements may end up teaching us something extremely revolutionary about all kinds of matter in the cosmos.”

More than two dozen Ohio State faculty, students and postdoctoral scholars have played a role in designing Roman’s surveys, including the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, a portion of the mission aimed at probing the structure and expansion of the universe as it evolved through cosmic time. Anthony Harbo Torres, a senior graduate student in physics at Ohio State who helped calibrate Roman’s image detectors, said that mission success can be attributed to decades of human ingenuity and perseverance.

“With Roman, we'll be seeing some things for the first time, as well as revisiting places we've seen before but with an increased level of resolution,” said Harbo Torres. “It takes so many people to tackle a monumental undertaking like this and make it possible, so I hope that our images inspire a sense of wonder when people see the scale and detail of the things we find.”

The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey aspect of the program plans to utilize the telescope to peer past the plane of the Milky Way to map about 12% of the sky in just under two years. In all, Roman's surveys will detect about a billion galaxies and 20 billion stars, more astronomical objects than have ever been detected by all of humanity’s telescopes put together, said Weinberg.

“For just one single point, displaying an image from this telescope would be like looking at a wall full of 4K televisions,” he said. “These will have an extraordinary image quality as it scans the sky for objects more than 100 million times too faint to see with the human eye.”

This preciseness is one that typically eludes scientists when trying to look through our planet’s blurring atmosphere, Weinberg said. Over the course of several months, Roman will settle into orbit at Lagrange point two (L2), a gravitationally stable point about a million miles away from Earth.

The Roman mission revolves around three core science themes — measuring dark energy, investigating exoplanets, and expanding the study of astrophysics and planetary science. Astronomers will use the data Roman sends back to study dark matter, an invisible substance that can only be perceived by its gravitational effect on other objects, as well as dark energy, a force that seems to have a hand in speeding up the universe’s expansion. Understanding these aspects can also offer insights into local galactic history and evolution.

“Mapping clusters of dark matter will help us figure out why gravity on the scale of the universe is so radically different from gravity on the scale of a solar system or galaxy,” said Weinberg. “Ohio State is part of the teams that are building the tools to actually do that advanced analysis.”

But just getting a better lay of the land isn’t Roman’s end goal. Creating a more detailed sketch of the cosmos will help scientists answer critical questions about the inner workings of the universe, such as whether stellar systems like ours are rare and how many black holes there may be in the Milky Way, and extend the search for potentially habitable exoplanets.

“Roman is going to allow us to find extremely rare things and things that don’t happen very often,” said Scott Gaudi, the principal investigator of the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “It’s going to be those things that are likely going to surprise us and lead to new avenues of research.”

Compared to legacy instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman will map the sky about 1,000 times faster than its predecessor, a process made more efficient by its wide field-of-view, said Gaudi. Using a planet-hunting method called microlensing in tandem with the traditional transiting technique, researchers expect Roman will detect around 100,000 worlds, ideally expanding NASA’s exoplanet catalog to new heights.

Although Roman is currently slated as a five-year mission, researchers hope the data it uncovers, along with the lifespan of its sturdy science instruments, allows the mission to continue operating for decades to come. “Even though Ohio State has a large footprint on the mission, we don’t even begin to cover a fraction of the kind of science that can and will be done with Roman,” said Gaudi. “Our job so far has been to make sure it’s successful.”

The telescope’s first science findings are expected in mid-2027, but in the meantime, groups like the Roman Science Collaboration, of which Weinberg is a leading member, are looking forward to seeing how returns from this mission inform the next generation of astronomical priorities.

“The value of producing really big, vital datasets is that you then enable anyone in the world to go and make discoveries with it,” said Weinberg. “That’s a really powerful way of doing science, and I think bringing that to space-based astronomy is very inspiring.”

To celebrate their role in the achievement, as many as 20 members of the Ohio State cohort plan to be present on the beach when Roman lifts off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This includes Christopher Hirata, another key member of Ohio State’s Roman science team and a professor of physics at Ohio State, who notes that as large data sets and machine learning algorithms become indispensable for studying the universe’s most fundamental parts, this mission is primed to reshape how future researchers interact with exciting new science tools.

“Roman’s technology will have a huge influence on the future of space science,” said Hirata. “From launch onward, it’s going to be spectacular.”

Quasars, distant cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, are among the most luminous objects in the universe. While not uncommon, their brightness can make it difficult to accurately measure the galaxy they reside in. This means scientists must use gravitational lensing to assist in analyzing these bright objects, a method that relies on studying how an object’s strong gravity bends light around its host galaxy. Yet despite their own powerful gravity, finding quasars that can act as lenses is uncommon.

Moreover, while nearly every galaxy is home to a black hole, research suggests those that form quasars may act as “missing links” into the formation and evolution of the early universe. Young ones, especially, could be key to unlocking vast cosmic secrets.

Now, to identify more quasars as gravitational lenses, researchers analyzed a list of 800,000 quasars from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. Then, using an AI model trained on a small sample of mock lenses, or fake examples of quasar lens systems, to automatically search for these rare events, researchers found seven new candidates.

“Quasars are like the baby pictures of a supermassive black hole,” said Everett McArthur, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University. “So exploring how we get from quasars to those black holes is really important.”

These new candidates double the number of quasars scientists have found by surveys in years past, and with more data, the discovery offers an opportunity to expand our knowledge of how their systems work as well as how the galaxy they reside in grows and evolves.

For instance, while the seven candidates in this study are located at least 5 to 6 billion light-years away from Earth, uncovering new insights about these faraway objects could also reveal valuable information about our own galaxy, said McArthur.

“By studying the tight correlation between galaxies and black holes, we could understand why our galaxy is the way that it is and perhaps why our own black hole is sometimes dormant,” he said.

The study was published July 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Outside of the team’s observations, what is unique about its work is the use of neural networks to achieve its result. Since there aren’t enough real-life examples of quasars acting as lenses, researchers had to teach their AI to identify the emission lines of potential quasars as gravitational lenses using a mixture of real quasar and background galaxy spectra.

This method created a simulation so impressive that the AI was able to recognize the subtle differences between normal and abnormal quasars with unique features, said McArthur.

“What this proves is our architecture was able to parse through a diverse array of quasar spectra in a really significant way,” said McArthur.

After whittling DESI’s list of 800,000 potential quasars to 200, the team hand-reviewed the shortened list before narrowing down the candidates to a final seven.

Going forward, the researchers will seek to directly confirm their observations using powerful space-based instruments like the Hubble Telescope. Once those deeper studies are completed, with more data, they expect to use their AI model to help future scientists search for and validate other kinds of strange cosmic phenomena.

“You can very well expand this type of study to find many rare anomalies in a spectrum,” said McArthur. “We’re in an era when science has suddenly become more accessible than ever, and applying AI to astronomy and machine learning methods to big data sets is part of that.”

Other co-authors from Ohio State are Klaus Honscheid and Claire Lamman. This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program.

Finished ahead of schedule and armed with vastly more data than expected, researchers plan to use DESI’s map, which is the largest high-resolution 3D construct of the universe ever made, to explore dark energy, the fundamental ingredient that makes up about 70% of the cosmos.

In the five years since DESI began collecting data, the survey has observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and 20 million stars, and its results have already revealed much about the structure and evolution of the universe, said Paul Martini, the instrument scientist during DESI construction and commissioning and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“DESI has been a superb international collaboration, and its incredibly fruitful scientific results are a leading example of its impact on the broader scientific community,” he said. 

DESI’s quest to understand dark energy is a global endeavor. The international experiment brings together the expertise of more than 900 researchers (including 300 PhD students) from over 70 institutions and is managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Researchers at Ohio State have been crucial partners to some of DESI’s most significant discoveries, from helping analyze the promising first-year results to learning how dark energy continues to evolve in unexpected ways.

“Ohio State made the largest contributions to the instrumentation, operations and analysis infrastructure of any university group in DESI,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at Ohio State. “We are proud of our collaboration’s world-leading results on dark energy, as well as pleased with the substantial, international media attention they have received.”

Amidst the program’s ambitious schedule, the DESI team’s ability to complete the survey in five years was challenged more than once, most notably by the Contras wildfire in 2022, which interrupted power and internet infrastructure in the observatory for months. Fortunately, these disruptions were isolated and fixed quickly, said Ashley Ross, lead scientist for the DESI large-scale structure catalogs and an assistant research professor of physics at Ohio State. 

“By coming up with creative solutions to address unforeseen problems, the high-quality data we collected each night was carefully and confidently used to obtain the exciting cosmological constraints that DESI is now known for,” said Ross. 

Now, with this new completed set of data, scientists will have significantly more information to test long-held hypotheses about the balance between dark energy and matter, and their answers may mark a major shift in how we think about our universe and its potential fate. 

Having measured cosmological data for six times as many galaxies and quasars as all previous measurements combined, the collaboration plans to immediately begin processing their completed dataset in the coming months, with the first dark energy results from DESI’s full five-year survey expected in 2027. 

After completing the original five-year mission, DESI plans to continue observations through 2028. This will include expanding its survey to include parts of the sky that are more challenging to observe: Constructing a more detailed map of the cosmos may also make it easier for scientists to study nearby objects like dwarf galaxies and stellar streams, and grant them the ability to paint a much clearer picture of the universe’s formation and history, said Honscheid. 

But in the meantime, the Ohio State team will continue refining their dark energy measurements by analyzing data gathered during the first three years, and optimize their telescope time and its capabilities to help make exciting new observations. 

“A larger survey footprint will greatly improve our constraints on cosmological parameters and improve our dark matter program,” said Honscheid. “But these achievements are only possible because the operations team worked incredibly hard to keep the survey progressing.”

Other Ohio State contributors to DESI include Matthew Berno, Mikel Charles, Carl Coker, Rebecca Coles, Andrei Cuceu, Xinyi Chen, Mark Derwent, Ann Elliott, Jack Elvin-Poole, Lauren Ennesser, Kevin Fanning, Simon Filbert, Meagan Herbold, Jennifer Johnson, Naim Karacayli, Hui Kong, Claire Lamman, Thomas O’Brien, Daniel Pappalardo, Richard Pogge, Anna Porredon, Michael Rashkovetskyi, Jon Shover, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, David Weinberg, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. 

DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the Secretariat of Science, Humanities, Technology and Innovation (SECIHTI) of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions.

The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation.

For decades, astronomers only had theories about where some of the heaviest elements in nature, like gold, uranium and platinum, come from. But by taking a fresh look at old archival data, researchers now estimate that up to 10% of these heavy elements in the Milky Way are derived from the ejections of highly magnetized neutron stars, called magnetars.

Until recently, astronomers had unwittingly overlooked the role that magnetars, essentially dead remnants of supernovae, might play in early galaxy formation, said Todd Thompson, co-author of the study and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“Neutron stars are very exotic, very dense objects that are famous for having really big, very strong magnetic fields,” said Thompson. “They’re close to being black holes, but are not.”

While the origins of heavy elements had long been a quiet mystery, scientists knew that they could only form in special conditions through a method called the r-process (or rapid-neutron capture process), a set of unique and complex nuclear reactions, said Thompson. 

Scientists saw this process in action when they detected the collision of two super-dense neutron stars in 2017. This event, captured using NASA telescopes, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) and other instruments, provided the first direct evidence that heavy metals were being created by celestial forces.  

But further evidence showed that other mechanisms might be needed to account for all these elements, as neutron star collisions might not produce heavy elements fast enough in the early universe. According to this new study, building on these clues helped Thompson and his collaborators recognize that powerful magnetar flares could indeed serve as a potential ejectors of heavy elements, a finding confirmed by 20-year-old observations of SGR 1806–20, a magnetar flare so bright that some measurements of the event could only be made by studying its reflection off the moon. 

By analyzing this magnetar flare event, researchers determined that the radioactive decay of the newly created elements matched up with their theoretical predictions about the timing and types of energies released by a magnetar flare after it ejected heavy r-process elements. The researchers also theorized that magnetar flares produce heavy cosmic rays, extremely high-velocity particles whose physical origin remains unknown. 

“I love new ideas about how systems work, how new discoveries work, how the universe works,” Thompson said. “That’s why results like this are really exciting.”

The study was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Magnetars may provide unique insights into galactic chemical evolution, including the formation of exoplanetary systems and their habitability. 

Not only do magnetars produce valuable metals like gold and silver that end up on Earth, the supernova explosions that cause them also produce elements like oxygen, carbon and iron that are vital for many other, more complex celestial processes. 

“All of that material they eject gets mixed into the next generation of planets and stars,” said Thompson. “Billions of years later, those atoms are incorporated into what could potentially amount to life.” 

Altogether, these findings have deep implications for astrophysics, particularly for scientists studying the origin of both heavy elements and fast radio bursts – brief shivers of electromagnetic radio waves from faraway galaxies. Understanding how matter ejects from magnetars could help scientists learn more about them. 

Due to their rarity and short duration, magnetar flares can be difficult to observe, 

and current space-based telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble don’t have the dedicated abilities needed to detect and study their emission signals. Even more specialized observatories like NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can only see the brightest part of gamma-ray flashes from nearby galaxies. 

Instead, one proposed NASA mission, the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), could bolster the team’s work by surveying the Milky Way for energetic events like giant magnetar flares. Though another event like SGR 1806-20 might not occur this century, if a magnetar flare did detonate in our backyard, COSI could be used to better identify the individual elements created from its eruption and allow this team of researchers to confirm their theory about where heavy elements in the universe come from. 

“We’re generating a bunch of new ideas about this field, and ongoing observations will lead to even more great connections,” said Thompson.

The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Charles University Grant Agency and the Simons Foundation. Co-authors include Anirudh Patel and Brian D. Metzger from Columbia University, Jakub Cehula from Charles University in Prague, Eric Burns from Louisiana State University and Jared A. Goldberg from the Flatiron Institute. 

New results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos ever conducted, reveal that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time — and the standard model of how the universe works may need an update. 

This recent finding uses data from the first three years of observations and includes nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars, more than doubling the dataset used in DESI’s first analysis, which was presented less than one year ago. It’s a major leap forward, improving the experiment’s precision with a dataset that is more than double what was used in DESI’s first analysis which also hinted at an evolving dark energy.

“Our results are truly remarkable,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at The Ohio State University. “We are seeing even stronger evidence for a fundamental shift in how we think about dark energy.” 

DESI is an international experiment with more than 900 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Ohio State has been a core member of the DESI collaboration for over a decade and includes 12 researchers actively working on the collection and analysis of DESI data. 

The collaboration shared their findings today in multiple papers that will be posted online and later in a presentation at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California. 

Taken alone, DESI’s data is consistent with our standard model of the universe. However, when paired with other measurements, there are mounting indications that the impact of dark energy may be weakening over time and other models may be a better fit. Those other measurements include the light left over from the dawn of the universe; supernovae, or exploding stars; and how light from distant galaxies is warped by gravity.

“These measurements show some evidence that the standard model of cosmology is not the best explanation,” said Ashley Ross, lead scientist for the DESI large-scale structure catalogs and a research professor of physics at Ohio State. “We now have multiple datasets that are pointing in this direction, which strengthens our confidence in our results.”    

While DESI’s previous release initially showed a preference for dynamical dark energy, many researchers thought a statistical fluke was a more likely explanation than a major discovery, said Paul Martini, one of the coordinators of the current analysis and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State. “Yet the evidence for dynamical dark energy has gotten stronger with more data, and it has passed new and tougher tests, so we are more confident and more excited.” 

In parallel to the DESI analysis, work is going on to plan the next phases of DESI that will follow at the end of the decade as well as for even more powerful instruments that will be built in the future. Besides DESI, other experiments coming online over the next several years will also provide complementary datasets for future analyses. 

The DESI collaboration also recently announced that its Data Release 1 (DR1) is now available for anyone to explore. With information on millions of celestial objects, the dataset will support a wide range of astrophysical research by others, in addition to DESI’s cosmology goals.

The discovery of dark energy, nearly 30 years ago, was already the biggest surprise of my scientific lifetime,” said David Weinberg, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State who also contributed to the DESI analysis. “These new measurements offer the strongest evidence so far that dark energy evolves, which would be another mind-blowing change to our understanding of how the universe works.” 

DESI is supported by the DOE Office of Science and by the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science national user facility. Additional support for DESI is provided by the U.S. National Science Foundation; the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom; the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; the Heising-Simons Foundation; the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA); the National Council of Humanities, Sciences, and Technologies of Mexico; the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain; and by the DESI member institutions. 

Other Ohio State members of the collaboration include Mikel Charles, Xinyi Chen, Meagan Herbold, Naim Karacayli, Peter Taylor, Wynne Turner, Molly Wolfson and Erik Zaborowski. The DESI collaboration is honored to be permitted to conduct scientific research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak), a mountain with particular significance to the Tohono O’odham Nation. 

The oldest medal awarded by the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Draper Medal celebrates those who have made “a recent, original investigation in astronomical physics, of sufficient importance and benefit to science to merit such recognition.” It is awarded every four years.

Leroy’s work was selected for pathbreaking efforts that have characterized, “in unprecedented detail, the physical nature of the interstellar medium and its relationship to star formation in nearby galaxies.” 

“We are thrilled that the National Academy of Sciences has recognized Professor Leroy with the Henry Draper Medal,” said David Horn, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State. 

“His pioneering contributions have advanced our understanding of the composition and history of the universe, and this prestigious award further enhances the reputation of our outstanding Department of Astronomy.”

The interstellar medium that Leroy studies is the gas and dust between stars. This material fills the space in galaxies, and often contains primordial leftovers from the beginnings of the universe. Because it is the fuel from which future stars are born and a complex ecosystem that links past and future generations of stars, the interstellar medium is a crucial research target for many fields of astronomy.  

“Understanding how cosmic ecosystems evolve is a big topic in astronomy right now,” Leroy said. “Because of technology made available to us in only the last five to 10 years, we’ve been able to bring this topic into focus, making new observations that finally answer questions we’ve had for decades.

Using special telescopes to study all sorts of light, especially radio and infrared light, allows scientists to peer into the interstellar medium directly, said Leroy. Before coming to Ohio State, Leroy worked at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which operates the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Very Large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope facilities. 

It was there that he began harnessing cutting-edge technology to conduct studies on molecular gas and star formation in galaxies. This led to him co-founding the PHANGS-ALMA project, now widely recognized as the first systematic survey of the many stellar nurseries and galaxies that dot our sky. 

“Lots of people do surveys of one galaxy or a small part of our Milky Way using one type of light and get a ton of detail, but miss the big picture,” said Leroy. “With PHANGS, we have worked to line up all the best telescopes in the world on a representative set of galaxies in order to take pictures of the entire cosmic ecosystem.” 

While scientists in the past could only obtain blurred or indistinct pictures of the gas and dust in faraway galaxies, today these same structures can be seen with remarkable detail.  

By combining the ALMA radio array with powerful instruments like the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, the PHANGS-ALMA project has mapped the gas, dust and newly born stars for more than 100,000 stellar nurseries across nearly 100 galaxies, providing a new generation of astrophysicists with an in-depth view of the area where stars and planets form. 

“What we've done is build an observational basis that informs how we go from a cosmos full of just spread-out hydrogen gas to the cosmos full of stars and galaxies we see around us,” Leroy said. “Our observations get at the core physics behind how galaxies turn their gas into stars.”

Many previous recipients of the Henry Draper Medal have a record of continued achievements in their fields: Six recipients have been honored with a National Medal of Science, while nine recipients have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

“This medal feels very validating for the impact of this work that our team has done,” Leroy said. "Studying the interstellar medium and star formation is important to many fields, but sometimes it can be under-the-hood research. So it’s neat to see it catching people’s imagination at the same level as black holes and pulsars.” 

Recipients also receive a cash prize of $25,000, which Leroy plans to use to bolster further collaboration with international colleagues, including other members of the PHANGS-ALMA team. Leroy praised the collaborative and supportive scientific environment at Ohio State for helping him win the award. 

“Ohio State’s astronomy department is world-famous for its invigorating, supportive atmosphere,” he said. “This is an amazing place to do cutting-edge research.” 

By combining local weather data with complex astrophysics simulations, researchers explored whether a device that typically detects high-energy particles called muons could be used to remotely measure tornado-producing supercell thunderstorms. 

Conventional tornado-tracking instrumentation relies on measurements made by technologies like drones or weather balloons, but those methods often require humans to get dangerously close to the path of an oncoming storm. 

Yet through studying how these storms affect muons, which are heavier than electrons and travel through matter at nearly the speed of light, these findings can act as another tool for scientists to gain a more accurate picture of underlying weather conditions. 

“The thing about atmospheric muons is that they’re sensitive to the properties of the atmosphere that they travel through,” said William Luszczak, lead author of the study and a fellow at the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at The Ohio State University. “If you have a group of muons that traveled through a thunderstorm, the amount you’re going to measure on the other side is different from a bundle of muons that traveled through a pretty day.”

The study was published on the open-access preprint server arXiv.

Compared to other cosmic particles, muons have many unique real-world applications, including helping scientists to peer inside large, dense objects like the pyramids or detecting hazardous nuclear material. Now, Luszczak’s simulations in this paper imply that supercell thunderstorms cause very slight changes in the number, direction and intensity of these particles. 

To determine this, the researchers applied a three-dimensional cloud model that could account for multiple variables, including wind, potential temperature, rain, snow and hail. Then, using atmospheric observations gathered from the 2011 supercell that passed through El Reno, Oklahoma, and spawned a tornado outbreak, Luszczak applied that information to measure variations in air pressure in the region around a simulated storm over the span of an hour. 

Overall, their results found that muons are indeed affected by the pressure field inside tornadoes, though more research is needed to learn more about the process.

In terms of how well it could work in the field, the concept is especially appealing, as utilizing muons to predict and analyze future weather patterns would also mean scientists wouldn’t necessarily have to try to place instruments very near a tornado to gain these pressure measurements, said Luszczak. 

Still, the type of muon particle detector that Luszczak’s paper considers is much smaller than other more well-known cosmic ray projects, such as the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina and the University of Utah’s Telescope Array. 

Unfortunately, these detectors don’t reside in places where they can study tornadoes, said Luszczak, but if placed in a region like Tornado Alley in the United States, researchers imagine that the device could easily complement typical meteorological and barometric measurements for tornadic activity. 

That said, the device’s size also influences how precise its measurements are, as scaling it up enhances the number of particles it can detect, said Luszczak. 

The smallest detector researchers describe in this paper is 50 meters across, or about the size of five buses. But while such a tool would be portable enough to ensure scientists could place it near many different types of storm systems, being so small would likely cause it to face some errors in its data-gathering, said Luszczak. 

Despite these potential setbacks, as supercell thunderstorms typically form and disappear in short periods, the paper emphasizes it may be well worth future scientists’ time to consider implementing a large detector in some regions – one that would likely be a permanent stationary establishment to catch as many muons as possible during severe weather events. 

More importantly, because current weather modeling systems are directly linked to when and where severe weather alerts are issued, using cosmic rays to strengthen those models would give the public a more detailed sense of a storm’s various twists and turns as well as more time to prepare for the phenomenon.  

“By having better measurements of the atmosphere surrounding a tornado, our modeling improves, which then improves the accuracy of our warnings,” said Luszczak. “This concept has a lot of promise, and it’s a really exciting idea to try to put into action.”

Leigh Orf of the University of Wisconsin-Madison was a co-author.