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Originally Posted by Zachary
High energy cosmic rays hitting the earth's atmosphere are already being researched, but it's a different kind of physics. In the LHC the collisions are occurring in a near-perfect vacuum, which is incredibly important, so we can observe all the by-products of the reaction in its entirety. Remember there are something like 10^23 atoms per square meter in air; the byproducts of the cosmic rays get absorbed by all this junk, and whilst it produces very pretty radiation showers, the event itself is completely worthless to a physicist trying to study the kind of physics being done at CERN.
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Cosmic ray collisions producing 'any' sort of reaction should be recorded if possible in case there is information obtainable from them. Most telescopes are not configured to view the edge of the atmosphere so it is unlikely to be an area of much competition. Cosmic Rays hit an area of the human hand at a rate of about one a second at the earth's surface so numbers of events is not a problem.
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Here's an interesting fact about these cosmic ray events. The speed of light changes depending on the material it's passing through; we all learnt that in school when we played about with blocks of glass and light. Whilst the speed of light in a vacuum is an absolute limit which nothing can pass, there's no reason why particles can't travel faster than the speed of light in air. This is exactly what happens when one of these high energy particles hits our atmosphere; the resulting radiation produced is so energetic that it moves through our atmosphere faster than light itself. The event only lasts for a few nanoseconds, but if you could record it, you would see the entire event in reverse! (tendrils of light shooting up and recombining into a giant flash).
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So is the reaction like grand scale Cerenkov radiation viewed from the one point of impact for each cosmic ray event. The point is do all the components have to be measured or can an extrapolation from a limited set of data be used to determine what sort of particle is produced.
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The reaction is so bright that it rivals the full moon in intensity, but because of its short duration our eyes don't register it.
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If just enough big stuff showed up alright and the hunt is only for the Higgs Boson ... it means if the Astronomers can focus their instruments they have a five or six month lead on the particle accelerator boys.