Proton Shower over Malargues / Chicago

Documentation for downloads of cosmic ray showers from http://astro.uchicago.edu/cosmus/projects/auger .

This interactive 3d model of a 1e19 eV proton shower over Malargues, Argentina, and Chicago, IL, USA. It was created for the Pierre Auger Observatory by the Cosmus Group at the University of Chicago. It requires a computer with a recent graphics card - if you bought your laptop in the last two years, you should be fine.

To run a GeoWall version, follow the same instructions are before but use the file labelled 'geowall'.

Windows

Click on shower.bat .

If you'd like a more user-friendly version, install Shockwave 10 on your machine, place the file Partiview.x32 in 

   C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\Macromed\Shockwave 10\Xtras

and then click on shower.exe . One problem with this version is that you can't move while the shower runs, hopefully that will be fixed in future versions.

Linux

In this directory, type 

  chmod +x data/partiview
  chmod +x *.csh
  ./shower.csh

If this doesn't work, you'll have to recompile Partiview (sorry!). Instructions for that are on the Partiview site.

Mac OS X

Click on shower.command

How to use

The key to navigation is to press a mouse button down, move the mouse, and release the mouse button. Navigation is inertia-based, so whatever you were doing when the mouse button is released continue to happens. If you want to stop movement, click once, without moving your mouse during the click.

  • Rotation / Spinning : left click & hold, then move.
  • Zooming: Right click (and hold!) the mouse and move up and down. (If you have a Mac with a one-button mouse, press the option key as you click that button.)
  • Stopping motion: click once with the mouse.
  • Translation. Press CTRL (and keep it pressed), then leftclick-hold-move.

The buttons at the top for Chicago and Argentina turn on and off the ground for those two places. You probably don't want both on at once. To start the animation of the cosmic ray shower, type "run" in the command window. That's the bottom part of the picture to the left, where it says "Cmd:". You can get to it by pressing TAB a few times. Alternatively, press the button that looks like a 'fast-forward' button on the left hand side of the menu.

What are the different colors?

Muons are red, Gamma ray photons are yellow, electrons and positrons are purple.

Want more showers?

Cosmus Cosmic Ray Showers

Credits

Shower simulation: AIRES by Sergio Sciutto
Simulation->Visualization: Maximo Ave, Tokonatsu Yamamoto (Pierre Auger / University of Chicago)
Visualization: Dinoj Surendran, Randy Landsberg, Mark SubbaRao (Cosmus / University of Chicago / Adler Planetarium)

The software used to view this shower is Partiview by Stuart Levy of the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Director plugin used in the Shockwave version was written by Toshiyuki Takahei of RIKEN in Tokyo.

The Auger scientists consulted in making this were Maximo Ave, Paolo Privitera, and Enrique Zas. Thanks also to Beatriz Garcia of Auger for providing a picture of the Malargues site.

The picture of the area around Lake Michigan came from Microsoft's Terraserver site.

Send any comments and questions to Dinoj and Randy.