Cosmic accelerator may be at work in galaxy

17 Jun 2002

A new study of 36 cosmic-ray events recorded with the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array (AGASA) in Japan demonstrates these extremely high energy events are distributed uniformly across the sky. A notable departure from this general pattern revelas three pairs of events whose directions of arrival are quite close, less than 2.5 degrees apart. Of these, two pairs are located within 2 degrees of the supergalactic plane, defined roughly by the agglomeration of bright nearby galaxies in the northern hemisphere. The Akeno scientists suggest that some kind of celestial accelerator may lie in the direction of the collimated pairs. The study will be published in an upcoming article in Physical Review Letters.