Implications of Auger Observations

The recently announced discovery of anisotropy in the direction of arrival of the ultra high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) by the Auger collaboration is giving us a new window to the Universe.

The simplest interpretation is that we know the source of these UHECRs, and they are protons. That is in fact what this collaboration announced in their Science paper.

Nevertheless we cannot yet make this conclusion as Professor Lemoine points out in his paper with Kumiko Kotera, mentioned in the note below.

In any case it is clear that we know more about the near Universe, one GZK unit distance away from us, than before this collaboration made the tremendous efforts required to build the biggest detector ever created to measure UHECRs.

One GZK distance unit is about 100 Mpc. Anything up to that distance goes almost unimpeded by the microwave background radiation between sources there, and us.

Once the northern counterpart of this global observatory is built in Colorado, for several years we will have a sampling of, either the last high magnetic field concentrations as Lemoine says, or maybe the real sources of these new probes to the Universe. No other telescope can do this, not the Hubble, nor any other of the existing ones. For the time being, our only source of information about UHECR physics in our neck of the woods, is given by the Pierre Auger Observatory (PAO).

These PAO observations were chosen by Science Magazine as the THIRD most important science news of 2007.

Congratulations to the Auger Collaboration!