Cosmic Accelerators?

The physicists from the Astronomy Decal Survey (Ice Cube and Anita) write:

"Observations of the UHECR spectrum above the ankle ( 3 × 10¹⁸ eV) from AGASA, HiRes and Auger show both a dip caused by e+ e− pair production [17, 18] and a bump consistent with a GZK accumulation clearly visible. In particular, hybrid energy measurements from Auger have reconciled the discrepancy between the HiRes and AGASA energy scales, favoring the HiRes claim of the observation of the GZK cutoff. This evidence supports a simple ansatz where UHECR are accelerated in extragalactic sources [11] and reaches us over a long baseline, favoring the bottom-up scenario [19]."

This means that dark matter particles do not seem to be very active producing clues for us to find them. They are more than 20% of all that there is in the universe, and do not show up in a top-down manner.

This is a good news bad news story. The good news is that all we were thinking of to explain the highest energy cosmic rays reaching earth are likely true. The bad news is that we are not going to find exotics this way.

Using the good news part of the story, all we need now is some good accelerator designs to imagine how are, the particles we know, elevated to such heights in the energy ladder.

My pet theory is that in the center of galaxies, the Active Galactic Nuclei, either produce or are fueled by Hawking Primordial Blach Holes.

Wouldn't that be neat? Giving a Nobel Prize to Stephen Hawking at the same time that Jim Cronin gets his second prize, now for telling all those cosmic ray physicists how an accelerator physicist does his thing.