Strange cosmic ray hotspots stalk southern skies

[HysteryDiagnosis]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20436-strange-cosmic-ray-hotspots-stalk-southern-skies.html


Cosmic funnel
One of the hotspots seen by IceCube points in the direction of the Vela supernova remnant, a possible source of cosmic rays, but it's almost 1000 light years away. Cosmic rays coming from such large distances should be constantly buffeted and deflected by galactic magnetic fields on route, and should thus have lost all directionality by the time they reach Earth. In other words, such long-distance cosmic rays should appear to come from all parts of the sky. That's not what has been observed.

Milagro has also seen hotspots that appear to come from implausibly distant sources. As an explanation, Felix Aharonian of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland and colleagues have suggested that there could be a "tube" of magnetic field lines extending between the source and our solar system, funnelling the cosmic rays towards us. However, Aharonian admits the theory is highly speculative.

Others have proposed that a local phenomenon called magnetic reconnection – in which solar magnetic field lines cross and rearrange, converting magnetic energy to kinetic energy – could be accelerating local cosmic rays to energies in the TeV range and beaming them towards Earth, creating the observed hotspots. "It implies that we have a Tevatron in the solar system," says Aharonian, referring to the particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. "That's also crazy, but it is at least less crazy than other explanations."