Magnitude of Cosmic Ray Bursts

Abstract

IN a paper which I had the privilege of presenting for them at the recent London Congress of Nuclear Physics, R. D. Bennett, G. S. Brown and H. A. Rahmel described some very large cosmic ray bursts, which they recorded using a large argon-filled ionisation chamber stationed on Mount Evans. In six of these bursts the number of ion pairs suddenly appearing within the chamber was greater than 3 × 10⁸. The largest one threw the electrometer off scale, which meant more than 6.25 × 10⁸ ion pairs. It is of interest to estimate the total energy involved in such a process.