BRAINCAKECosmic Rays
Cosmic rays are high energy particles which travel through space from the stars.
They create showers of short-lived particles, antiparticles and photons when they enter the Earth's atmosphere.
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Key terms in this lesson
- Photon
- A discrete packet, or quantum, of electromagnetic energy.
- Antiparticle
- A particle with the same rest mass as its corresponding particle but with opposite charge and opposite values of other quantum properties.
- Muon
- A negatively charged lepton, similar to but much heavier than the electron, produced for example by cosmic rays in the atmosphere.
- Pion
- A meson, made of a quark-antiquark pair, that may be positively charged, negatively charged or neutral; produced through the strong interaction and decaying through the weak interaction.
- Kaon
- A strange meson, produced through the strong interaction and decaying through the weak interaction, with a rest mass between that of a pion and a proton.
More in Quarks and Leptons
- Muons
- Pions
- Kaons
- Particle Accelerators
- Classifying Particles and Antiparticles
- Leptons
- Hadrons
- Particle Colliders and Energy
All 17 lessons in Quarks and Leptons · All AQA AS-level Physics topics