Related papers: On the Origin of Cosmic Rays
In a letter with the above title, published some time ago in PRL, Waxman made the interesting suggestion that cosmological gamma ray bursts (GRBs) are the source of the ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR). This has also been proposed…
Cosmic rays are mostly composed of protons accelerated to relativistic speeds. When those protons encounter interstellar material, they produce neutral pions which in turn decay into gamma rays. This offers a compelling way to identify the…
Recent observations provide compelling evidence that the bulk of the high energy cosmic rays (CRs) and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are co-produced by highly relativistic jets of plasmoids of stellar matter. These jets are launched by fall back…
A review is given of the main properties of the charged component of galactic cosmic rays, particles detected at Earth with an energy spanning from tens of MeV up to about 10^19 eV. After a short introduction to the topic and an historical…
Various studies have implied the existence of a gaseous halo around the Galaxy extending out to 100 kpc. Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) that propagate to the halo, either by diffusion or by convection with the possibly existing large-scale…
Several large cosmic ray (CR) detectors have recently provided data on the arrival directions of CR, which taken together with previous data recorded over many decades allow the amplitgude and phase of the first harmonic to be derived with…
We derive constraints that must be satisfied by the sources of ~10^{15} to ~10^{18} eV cosmic rays, under the assumption that the sources are Galactic. We show that while these constraints are not satisfied by ordinary supernovae (SNe),…
The energy spectrum, composition and arrival directions of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) with energy above the cosmic ray ankle, measured by the Pierre Auger Observatory, are inconsistent if their origin is assumed to be…
Cosmic-rays with energies exceeding 10^{19} eV are referred to as Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs). The sources of these particles and their acceleration mechanism are unknown, and for many years have been the issue of much debate.…
The article gives a brief overview, aimed at nonspecialists, about the goals and selected recent results of the detection of very-high energy gamma-rays (energies above 100 GeV) with ground based detectors. The stress is on the physics…
The arrival directions of Galactic cosmic rays (CRs) are highly isotropic. This is expected from the presence of turbulent magnetic fields in our Galactic environment that repeatedly scatter charged CRs during propagation. However, various…
The identification of Cosmic Ray (CR) sources represents one of the biggest and long-standing questions in astrophysics. Direct measurements of cosmic rays cannot provide directional information due to their deflection in (extra)galactic…
SNRs are likely to be significant sources of Galactic cosmic rays up to the knee. They produce gamma rays in the very-high-energy (E>100 GeV) range mainly via two mechanisms: hadronic interactions of accelerated protons with the…
We discuss ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays (CR) from minor sources and their possible contribution to the extragalactic diffuse gamma-ray emission. As an illustration of minor sources we consider possible specific type of active…
Motivated by recent measurements of the major components of the cosmic radiation around 10 TeV/nucleon and above, we discuss the phenomenology of a model in which there are two distinct kinds of cosmic ray accelerators in the galaxy.…
Analyses of TeV-PeV cosmic ray (CR) diffusion around their sources usually assume either isotropic diffusion or anisotropic diffusion due to the regular Galactic magnetic field. We show that none of them are adequate on distances smaller…
Precise measurements of the energy spectra of cosmic rays (CRs) show various kinds of features deviating from single power-laws, which give very interesting and important implications on their origin and propagation. Previous measurements…
We explore scenarios where the highest energy cosmic rays (HECR) are produced by new particle physics near the grand unification scale. Using detailed numerical simulations of extragalactic cosmic and gamma-ray propagation, we show the…
In the 1960s, the remnants of supernova explosions (SNRs) were indicated as a possible source of galactic cosmic rays through the Diffusive Shock Acceleration (DSA) mechanism. Since then, the observation of gamma-ray emission from…
We briefly discuss three aspects related to the origin of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) namely: 1) particle acceleration in astrophysical sources; 2) transition to an extragalactic origin; 3) spectrum and anisotropies at the…