Possible Extragalactic Sources of the Highest Energy Cosmic Rays

Abstract

We give an outline of possible extragalactic explanations of the highest energy cosmic ray events. We give a classification of the possible particles which could have caused the events and try to find suitable sources for each class. In contrast to some previous investigations of other authors, we find a possible candidate of a local FR-II radio galaxy close to the Fly's Eye event, and less powerful active galaxies close to the AGASA event. We also note the interesting coincidence that we have strong, distant quasars inside the arrival direction error regimes of both the Fly's Eye and AGASA event. We briefly discuss the consequences for the cosmic ray spectrum and composition at highest energies, which could be investigated by future experiments.

Contributed paper to the 17th Texas Symposium, Munich, Dec 1994; 4 pages, uudecoded compressed PostScript file, figures included.

References in corpus (5)

• Detection of a Cosmic Ray with Measured Energy Well Beyond the Expected Spectral Cutoff due to Cosmic Microwave Radiation
• In Search of a Source for the 320 Eev Fly's Eye Cosmic Ray
• On the Origin of Highest Energy Cosmic Rays
• Cosmic Rays From Cosmic Strings
• Extragalactic ultra high energy cosmic rays, II. Comparison with experimental data

Cited by in corpus (1)

• The 320 EeV Fly's Eye event: a key messenger or a statistical oddity ?