Correlation of the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays with Nearby Extragalactic Objects

By J. Abraham, P. Abreu, M. Aglietta, C. Aguirre, D. Allard, I. Allekotte, J. Allen, P. Allison, C. Alvarez, J. Álvarez-Muñiz and 435 more. Science, 2007

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Using data collected at the Pierre Auger Observatory during the past 3.7 years, we demonstrated a correlation between the arrival directions of cosmic rays with energy above 6 × 1019 electron volts and the positions of active galactic nuclei (AGN) lying within ∼75 megaparsecs. We rejected the hypothesis of an isotropic distribution of these cosmic rays with at least a 99% confidence level from a prescribed a priori test. The correlation we observed is compatible with the hypothesis that the highest-energy particles originate from nearby extragalactic sources whose flux has not been substantially reduced by interaction with the cosmic background radiation. AGN or objects having a similar spatial distribution are possible sources.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22fbbe88130782865b3bb34cf325ac40bb74eaff

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• INDICATIONS OF INTERMEDIATE-SCALE ANISOTROPY OF COSMIC RAYS WITH ENERGY GREATER THAN 57 EeV IN THE NORTHERN SKY MEASURED WITH THE SURFACE DETECTOR OF THE TELESCOPE ARRAY EXPERIMENT (2014, methodology): “In the highest-energy region, E > 57 EeV, the PAO found correlations of the cosmic-ray directions within a 3.”
• ROLE OF LINE-OF-SIGHT COSMIC-RAY INTERACTIONS IN FORMING THE SPECTRA OF DISTANT BLAZARS IN TeV GAMMA RAYS AND HIGH-ENERGY NEUTRINOS (2010, background): “…arrival directions of cosmic rays with extragalactic sources because of the effects of the Milky Way magnetic fields (Harari et al. 2000a, 2000b; Abraham et al. 2007, 2008; Golup et al. 2009; Murase & Beacom 2010; Calvez et al. 2010), which are known to have magnitudes as large as several…”
• FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE VIEW OF THE CORE OF THE RADIO GALAXY CENTAURUS A (2010, methodology): “…directions of the highest energy cosmic rays (& 6× 1019 eV) observed by the Auger105 observatory are correlated with nearby AGN, including Cen A (Abraham et al. 2007, 2008), while106 Moskalenko et al. (2009) found that, if the giant lobes are taken into account, as many as four107 ultra-high…”