Update on tests of the Cen A neutron-emission model of highest energy cosmic rays

Abstract

We propose that neutron emission from Cen A dominates the cosmic ray sky at the high end of the spectrum. Neutrons that are able to decay generate proton diffusion fronts, whereas those that survive decay produce a spike in the direction of the source. We use recent data reported by the Pierre Auger Collaboration to normalize the injection spectrum and estimate the required luminosity in cosmic rays. We find that such a luminosity, L_{CR} ~ 5 x 10^{40} erg/s, is considerably smaller than the bolometric luminosity of Cen A, L_{bol} ~ 10^{43} erg/s. We compute the incoming current flux density as viewed by an observer on Earth and show that the anisotropy amplitude is in agreement with data at the 1σlevel. Regardless of the underlying source model, our results indicate that after a decade of data taking the Pierre Auger Observatory will be able to test our proposal.

To be published in PRD

References in corpus (5)

• Update on the correlation of the highest energy cosmic rays with nearby extragalactic matter
• Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays from Black Hole Jets of Radio Galaxies
• Anisotropy vs chemical composition at ultra-high energies
• Search for First Harmonic Modulation in the Right Ascension Distribution of Cosmic Rays Detected at the Pierre Auger Observatory
• Ultra-high Energy Predictions of proton-air Cross Sections from Accelerator Data

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays
• TANAMI monitoring of Centaurus A: The complex dynamics in the inner parsec of an extragalactic jet
• High-energy neutrinos from radio galaxies
• Centaurus A: the one extragalactic source of cosmic rays with energies above the knee
• IceCube PeV Cascade Events Initiated by Electron-Antineutrinos at Glashow Resonance
• The Role of Structured Magnetic Fields on Constraining Properties of Transient Sources of Ultra-high-energy Cosmic Rays
• The Centaurus A Ultrahigh-Energy Cosmic Ray Excess and the Local Extragalactic Magnetic Field
• Possible Emission of Cosmic $X$-- and $\gamma$--rays by Unstable Particles at Late Times
• Ensemble Fluctuations of the Flux and Nuclear Composition of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Ray Nuclei
• Sensitivity of full-sky experiments to large scale cosmic ray anisotropies
• Centaurus A as a point source of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
• Testing Hadronic Models of Gamma Ray Production at the Core of Cen A
• Transformation of intermediate times in the decays of moving unstable quantum systems via the exponential modes
• Sensitivity of orbiting JEM-EUSO to large-scale cosmic-ray anisotropies