1999/06/30 by Diego Harari, Silvia Mollerach, Esteban Roulet · 9 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic ray #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Energy spectrum #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Magnetic field #Magnification #Optics #Physics #Sky #Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray #astro-ph #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1126-6708/1999/08/022
published as JHEP 9908 (1999) 022 · 22 pages, uses JHEP.cls
openalex publication_date 1999/08/27 · arxiv created 1999/12/07 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the effects of the galactic magnetic field on the ultra high energy cosmic ray propagation. We show that the deflections of the cosmic ray trajectories can have many important implications such as (de)magnification of the cosmic ray fluxes by lensing effects (which can modify the spectrum of individual sources), the formation of multiple images of a source or the existence of regions of the sky to which the Earth is almost blind. The appearance of image pairs is related to the existence of critical curves in the magnification maps, which divide regions in the sky where the images have opposite parities. The results are pictorially illustrated as the stretching and folding of a `sheet' describing the sky seen on Earth. Making use of the most energetic AGASA events we emphasize the need to know the cosmic ray composition and the structure of the magnetic field when attempting to do detailed cosmic ray astronomy.