he New Starry Messengers

Ken Ragan

The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius in Latin) was the title of Galileo's work of 1610 that announced his revolutionary discoveries with the scientific wonder of the age: the newly invented telescope. Four centuries on, new starry messengers have emerged: in addition to our ongoing exploration of the cosmos using the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves to gamma rays, we have started to understand that particles such as neutrinos and cosmic rays give us complementary information about the Universe around us. Capturing these particles requires unusual “telescopes” buried deep underground, at the bottom of the ocean, or deep in Antartic ice! This talk will explore some of the cutting-edge ideas in the detection of particles from the cosmos, and what we hope to learn from these efforts