Physics – Plasma Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2002
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002aipc..649..450t&link_type=abstract
AIP Conference Proceedings, vol. 649, iss. no. 1, p. 450-453
Physics
Plasma Physics
2
Black Body Radiation, Cosmic Dust, Cosmic Rays, Electric Charge, Energy Spectra, Experiment Design, Plasma Physics, Relativistic Particles, Solar Radiation, Velocity, X Ray Spectra, Cosmic Rays, Dusty Or Complex Plasmas, Plasma Crystals
Scientific paper
The biggest observational mystery is the presence in cosmic rays particles with energies about 1021 eV which should be destroyed while travelling through 3degK black body radiation. One possibility is that they are not protons but dust particles containing 1010 or more protons with moderate gamma = (1 - vd2/c2-1/2) about 10-100 (vd being the dust velocity). By analyzing the process of charging for fast grains we obtained that the dust grains travelling through interstellar media will loose their charge during less than 104 s when the dust velocities exceed the thermal electron velocity of interstellar plasma and can not be charged if vd > 0.1 x c. This result excludes dust acceleration by a random walk in magnetic shocks to create relativistic neutral atoms in cosmic rays by a decay of accelerated grains 1. The grains surrounding pre-supernova can be accelerated up to gamma = 100 by radiation pressure of the light emitted in supernova explosions. Relativistic dust grains will approach the Earth as showers but not as flux constant in time. When approaching the Earth the relativistic dust particles can be destroyed by solar radiation 2 since the solar radiation in the rest frame of relativistic grain corresponds to X-ray frequency range. For energy larger than critical the delta- electrons created inside the dust particles by X-ray photons will escape the grain and will continuously charge the dust positively until it is disrupted by the large positive dust charge. The critical value gammacr such that for gamma > gammacr the dust particle is destroyed by solar radiation is calculated in the present paper numerically and indicates that for rigid crystalline grains of the size about 1 mum gammacr is rather large 4.7 x 104. The obtained results can be used to distinguish the source of cosmic ray showers in the planned measurements of cosmic ray showers from space by a system of detectors on satellites. The disruption of relativistic grains by solar radiation produces small explosions which can be detected.
Bingham Richard
Tsytovich Vadim N.
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