1,000 students in person and more than 800 online are taking part today, November 13, in the 2025 International Cosmic Day (ICD), the international day dedicated to cosmic-ray physics, coordinated in Italy by the INFN National Institute for Nuclear Physics project OCRA – Outreach Cosmic Ray Activities, aimed at teachers and students of upper secondary schools throughout Italy to involve them in cosmic-ray physics.
What are cosmic particles? Where do they come from? What messages do they carry? How can we measure them? These are the questions that upper secondary school students, in university classrooms and research laboratories, will attempt to answer with hands-on experiments during this day dedicated to cosmic rays.
Italian students, like peers abroad, today have the opportunity to try their hand at data analysis from a real cosmic-ray detector, the instrument with which particles arriving from space are observed and measured. In some locations, the first in-depth meetings have already taken place, during which students have explored various topics related to cosmic rays through experimental activities. Some students will then continue, even after the ICD, with a training programme that will conclude with the drafting of a final report.
The meetings in universities and INFN laboratories have been organised this year by the INFN divisions or associated groups of Bari, Catania, Cosenza, Ferrara, Florence, Genoa, Lecce, Milan Bicocca, Naples, Padua, Palermo, Pavia, Perugia, Pisa, Rome Sapienza, Rome Tor Vergata, Roma Tre, Siena, Turin and Trieste, together with TIFPA in Trento and the INFN National Laboratories of Legnaro and Gran Sasso, the latter in collaboration with the GSSI Gran Sasso Science Institute and the University of L’Aquila. The online connection is organised by the INFN Milan division and is scheduled for 10:30 on the YouTube channel of the INFN educational projects.
The OCRA project and the International Cosmic Day ICD
OCRA – Outreach Cosmic Ray Activities is a project carried out by the INFN through the Third Mission Coordination Committee (CC3M), which supports Public Engagement projects promoted by the research community through an internal peer-review process. OCRA was conceived in 2019 with the idea of bringing young people closer to the scientific method and to cosmic-ray physics, offering schools activities in which students take part directly in measurements of atmospheric muons using instruments built with cutting-edge technologies, similar to those of some of the INFN’s flagship experiments but easy to use and suitable for use in schools and at festivals and public events.
Starting from the 2024/2025 school year, OCRA has been renewed to offer schools a more structured and complete programme, still centred on the scientific method and the study of cosmic rays. The new programme runs throughout the school year and includes, in addition to participation in the ICD, further meetings in which students can explore and directly experiment with scientific activities using a cosmic-ray detector. The meetings are organised locally and involve the use of different types of instrumentation available at the participating INFN sites.
The OCRA project involves teachers and researchers in the INFN divisions and universities of Bari, Cosenza, Ferrara, Florence, Lecce, Milan, Milan Bicocca, Naples, Padua, Pavia, Perugia, Pisa, Rome Sapienza, Rome Tor Vergata, Roma Tre, Siena, Turin, Trieste and, finally, TIFPA in Trento, the INFN National Laboratories of Legnaro and Gran Sasso, the latter in collaboration with the GSSI – Gran Sasso Science Institute and the University of L’Aquila.
The ICD is an international initiative that aims to bring upper secondary school students closer to the world of frontier scientific research, guiding them through the mysteries of the universe contained in cosmic rays. The initiative is coordinated worldwide by the German research centre DESY in Hamburg and organised in collaboration, in addition to the INFN and various Italian universities, with the most important research centres operating in particle physics: CERN in Geneva, Fermilab in Chicago and the groups International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG), the German Netzwerk Teilchenwelt and the US-based QuarkNet.
