Wichita ? Nobel Prize winners don’t flock to southwest Kansas. Not yet.

But some state officials and scientists now look to the stars. And to black holes.

There’s serious talk about bringing hundreds of millions of dollars to Colorado and perhaps to Kansas to study cosmic rays — ultra-high-energy particles that strike us from galaxies and other places far, far away.

The Kansas Senate passed a resolution last month proposing to literally reach for the stars. With water tanks.

James Watson Cronin, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, talked to state legislators on April 28 about installing cosmic ray sensors in a water tank array stretching across thousands of square miles of the cornfields and cow pastures of Colorado and Kansas.

This is not pie in the sky. Cronin and colleagues already have talked 16 countries into spending more than $50 million to build the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory in Argentina. Now he wants Auger North, at $127 million.

Nick Solomey at Wichita State University, a physicist carrying the numbers of no less than 10 Nobel Prize winners in his cell phone, says luring astrophysicists to Kansas should be a no-brainer.

Cronin had sat as a young man in the classrooms of Enrico Fermi, who helped develop the first nuclear reactor, and Edward Teller, who helped develop the first hydrogen bomb.

Cronin, with colleague Alan Watson — another Nobel winner — developed the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory, inaugurated in Argentina in 2008, the biggest cosmic ray detector ever built.

It studies ultra-energetic cosmic rays, the most energetic, rarest and most mysterious particles in the universe. What are they? What force of nature shoots such fantastically fast particles through the universe?

“It’s basic science, far-out science, exploring phenomena of nature in the universe,” Cronin said. “Its practical value is hard to assess, and probably doesn’t exist.

“If you build a complicated piece of equipment you might discover practical uses. But it’s an astronomy project.”