Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2004-05-27
JCAP 0408 (2004) 012
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
15 pages, 16 ps figures, published version with minor changes, see http://stacks.iop.org/1475-7516/2004/i=08/a=012
Scientific paper
10.1088/1475-7516/2004/08/012
We investigate the dependence of composition, spectrum and angular distributions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays above 10^19 eV from individual sources on their magnetization. We find that, especially for sources within a few megaparsecs from the observer, observable spectra and composition are severely modified if the source is surrounded by fields of ~ 10^-7 Gauss on scales of a few megaparsecs. Low energy particles diffuse over larger distances during their energy loss time. This leads to considerable hardening of the spectrum up to the energy where the loss distance becomes comparable to the source distance. Magnetized sources thus have very important consequences for observations, even if cosmic rays arrive within a few degrees from the source direction. At the same time, details in spectra and chemical composition may be intrinsically unpredictable because they depend on the unknown magnetic field structure. If primaries are predominantly nuclei of atomic mass A accelerated up to a maximum energy E_max with spectra not much softer than E^-2, secondary protons from photo-disintegration can produce a conspicuous peak in the spectrum at energy ~ E_max/A. A related feature appears in the average mass dependence on energy.
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