2013/09/24 by ARGO-YBJ Collaboration, YBJ Collaboration · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex) #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1309.6182
openalex publication_date 2013/09/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Measuring the anisotropy of the arrival direction distribution of cosmic rays provides important information on the propagation mechanisms and the identification of their sources. In fact, the flux of cosmic rays is thought to be dependent on the arrival direction only due to the presence of nearby cosmic ray sources or particular magnetic-field structures. Recently, the observation of unexpected excesses at TeV energy down to angular scale as narrow as ∼10° raised the possibility that the problem of the origin of galactic cosmic rays may be addressed by studying the anisotropy. The ARGO-YBJ experiment is a full-coverage EAS array, sensitive to cosmic rays with energy threshold of a few hundred GeV. Searching for small-size deviations from the isotropy, the ARGO-YBJ collaboration explored the declination region δ∼-20∘÷80∘, making use of about 3.7⋅1011 events collected from November 2007 to May 2012. In this paper the detection of different significant (up to 13 standard deviations) medium-scale anisotropy regions in the arrival directions of CRs is reported. The observation was performed with unprecedented detail. The relative excess intensity with respect to the isotropic flux extends up to 10-3. The maximum excess occurs for proton energies of 10-20 TeV, suggesting the presence of unknown features of the magnetic fields the charged cosmic rays propagate through, or some contribution of nearby sources never considered so far. The observation of new weaker few-degree excesses throughout the sky region 195∘≤ \ra ≤ 290∘ is reported for the first time.