Auger 1

"1 Introduction

The identification of the sources of the cosmic rays with the highest energies so far detected has been a great challenge ever since the first event with energy around 10²⁰ eV was reported [2]. If the highest-energy cosmic rays are predominantly protons and nuclei, only sources which are less than about 200 Mpc from Earth could contribute significantly to the observed flux above 6x10¹⁹ eV. Protons with higher energies interact with cosmic microwave background photons to produce pions [3,4], which leads to a significant attenuation of their flux from more distant sources. The energy of light nuclei is damped over an even shorter length scale due to photo-disintegration processes [5,6]. If the relatively nearby sources are not uniformly distributed then we expect that the arrival directions of the most energetic cosmic rays should be anisotropic, as long as deflections imprinted by intervening magnetic fields upon their trajectories are small enough that they point back to their place of origin."

I couldn´t resist placing here this first paragraph of the paper published by over four hundred people. I wonder who wrote that part?

I want to write here that Alberto Cordero Dávila proposed the Schmidt camera optical architecture used for this historical discovery.