What's this boring looking thing? It's anything but boring, although its mission is like watching grass grow until it's hit by an ultrahigh energy cosmic ray! This is an element of the Telescope Array Cosmic Observatory west of Delta, Utah. It's one of 507 scintillator detectors that are spread across ~270^2 miles. Since 2008, 30 ultra-high-energy cosmic particles have been detected. Thus far, there's no explanation for their extreme energy or their origin.
Remarkable, and fascinating, particularly in what seems to be mechanical simplicity.
I thought high energy particles had to be detected deep (+3km) underground, to filter out regular (mundane?) radiation, and, probably, maybe, to slow them down a bit.
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