One day, conducting another experience with the help of Wilson's camera, Skobeltsyn saw a particle that flew hundreds of thousands of times faster than a bullet or shell! Dmitry Vladimirovich found a trace of a charged particle, the path of which, contrary to custom, was not curved by the magnetic field created in the chamber.
Wow!" thought the scientist. - So can only behave with a particle with very high energy. Even a magnetic field cannot deflect it from the path! Where could it come from?
Its measurements showed that none of the known Earth's radioactive sources could emit a particle with such high energy.
Skobeltsyn came to the conclusion that the phenomenon he observed was of extraterrestrial origin. The traces led to space.
Gradually Skobeltsyn and scientists who continued to study the cause of ionization of the atmospheric air, realized that the observed phenomena are identical, that the assumed cosmic rays are not electromagnetic radiation of an unknown type, and the flow of charged particles. So now they are called cosmic ray particles, reminiscent of the past mistake and explaining the actual state of affairs.
From that memorable day, when the first space particle flew into Skobeltsyn's device, the scientist was captured by fascination with cosmic rays. And he moved his work into the field of particle physics and carried his students with him.
So the basis of the Soviet school of specialists in space particle science was laid. So the grain which has grown in due course in a branchy tree of physics of space particles has been sown.
Systematic study of space particles began. Observing hundreds, thousands of fast space particles in Wilson's chamber, studying the form of their traces, determining their mass, energy, charge and other data, scientists learned that most of the space particles are hydrogen nuclei, protons. Minorities are the nuclei of other elements. Scientists have seen that cosmic particles are not uncommon. But before they reach the surface of the Earth, billions of collisions occur in the atmosphere between them and air atoms. In doing so, invisible links between cosmic particles and electromagnetic fields of atoms are established and severed.
After all, only us, the inhabitants of the big world, it seems that the air is transparent and ethereal. For cosmic particles, inhabitants of the microcosm, the air is dense, as the most dense forest, full of obstacles, saturated with the forces of attraction and repulsion.
The space particle, having got into the earthly atmosphere, experiences a cascade of amazing transformations. For example, when confronted with the nucleus of an atom of nitrogen or oxygen in the air, it can break it and produce new particles, transferring its energy to them. Those, in turn, can also break a number of nuclei. Thus, as we approach the surface of the Earth, the number of particles will gradually increase. An avalanche is growing, surrounded by the gust of this kind of chain reaction.
The most discerning scientists realized that the solution to the properties of cosmic particles is not only the answer to cosmic problems, but also to purely earthly questions. And in particular, they hide the possibility of approaching the mysteries of the atomic nucleus structure. These scientists decided to use space particles as a tool to destroy atomic nuclei.
Very well, they argued that space has taken care to deliver us the particles of enormous energy. After all, we do not yet know how to manufacture such shells on our Earth. We use them as a hammer to break atoms, or as a microscopic bomb that explodes the nucleus of matter - and see what they have inside!
After all, when a primary cosmic particle enters the atmosphere, masses of various particles are born, and among them there can be still unknown! In addition, the energy of cosmic particles is so enormous that, by entering the Earth's atmosphere, not only do they "rip off" electrons from the atoms in the path, but they also shatter the nuclei of some of them. And if we can analyze the processes of nuclear and electromagnetic interactions at such high energies, we can finally shed light on the structure of matter, its elementary particles!
But in order to "weigh" all these newly born particles, to determine their mass, energy, speed, scientists had to be no less inventive than their colleagues, who solved the problem of weighing the Earth and other planets.
However, the technique of the experiment was improved. To help Wilson's camera appeared and other devices: automatic installations with ionization chambers, in which the cosmic particles caused an electric discharge of different size, photoemulsions, in which due to blackening of silver grains it was possible to track down almost all participants of the microscopic catastrophe, counters Cherenkov and various combinations of these devices with radio engineering schemes.
Gradually, scientists managed not only to "see" the most cosmic particle, not only to measure its mass, speed and energy.
The day has come when scientists saw how, breaking the oncoming atom, the cosmic particle gave birth to a positron - a particle that nobody else has seen yet.