2006/01/08 by Franco Ferrari, Ferrari, Franco, E. Szuszkiewicz +1
Health Professions · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics (astro-ph) #FOS: Physical sciences #Nuclear Physics and Applications #Radiation Therapy and Dosimetry #Radioactivity and Radon Measurements
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0601158
openalex publication_date 2006/01/08 · openalex created_date 2022/08/28 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cosmic rays represent one of the most fascinating research themes in modern astronomy and physics. After almost a century since their discovery, a huge amount of scientific literature has been written on this topic and it is not always easy to extract from it the necessary information for somebody who approaches the subject for the first time. This has been the main motivation for preparing this article, which is a concise and self-contained review for whoever is interested in studying cosmic rays. The priority has been given here to well established facts, which are not at risk to get obsolete in a few years due to the fast progress of the research in this field. Also many data are presented, which are useful to characterize the doses of ionizing radiation delivered to organisms living on the Earth due to cosmic rays. The technical terms which are often encountered in the scientific literature are explained in a separate appendix.