
Scientists link mysterious highest-energy cosmic rays with violent black holes
Date: Thursday, November 08, 2007 @ 22:36:00 UTC Topic: Science
Scientists of the Pierre Auger Collaboration announced today (Nov. 8)
that active galactic nuclei are the most likely candidate for the
source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth.
...The exact mechanism of how AGNs
can accelerate particles to energies 100 million times higher than the
most powerful particle accelerator on Earth is still a mystery...
Using the
Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina, the largest cosmic-ray
observatory in the world, a team of scientists from 17 countries found
that the sources of the highest-energy particles are not distributed
uniformly across the sky. Instead, the Auger results link the origins
of these mysterious particles to the locations of nearby galaxies that
have active nuclei in their centers...
Full story: http://www.physorg.com/news113754342.html
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