The supergalactic structure and the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays

Peter L. Biermann, Hyesung Kang, Dongsu Ryu

Published 1997-09-25Version 1

The recent discoveries of several reliable events of high energy cosmic rays at an energy above 10^20 eV raise questions about their path through the nearby universe. The two analyses of the Haverah Park data set and the Akeno data set appear to have an inconsistent pattern. Both data sets showed some measure of a correlation with the supergalactic plane, the locus of cosmologically nearby galaxies, radio galaxies and clusters of galaxies. We need a reasonable model of the true intergalactic magnetic field. Using recent cosmological simulations of structure formation in the universe, we estimate the magnetic fields which correspond to the upper limits in the Rotation Measure to distant radio sources. We estimate that the magnetic field strength in supergalactic sheets and filaments may be in the range of 0.1 to 1 muG. If such strengths are realized inside our Local Supercluster, this opens up the possibility to focus charged particles in the direction perpendicular to the supergalatic plane, analoguously but in the opposite direction to solar wind modulation. If focusing exists, it means that for all particles captured into the sheets, the dilution with distance d is 1/d instead of 1/d^2. This means in effect, that we may see sources to much larger distances than expected sofar. This effect is relevant only for energies for which the possible distances are smaller than the void scale of the cosmological galaxy distribution, in the range possibly up to 100 Mpc.