“Interstellar Molecular Clouds as Cosmic Ray Detectors” Seminar

Our guest, Prof. Shmuel Bialy from the Physics Department at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, will present new JWST observations of H2 line emission in cold Galactic clouds, yielding the first detection of cosmic-ray-excited H2. This emission provides a new and direct way to measure the cosmic-ray ionization rate, and opens the possibility of using molecular clouds as giant detectors of low-energy cosmic rays.