Major Cosmic Ray Advance: Black Hole Sources
Over the last 50 years astrophysicists have wondered where all the cosmic rays that pervade the cosmos were coming from. Clearly well-known classes of stars and supernovae were contributing their share, but it did not appear to add up to enough, and then there were unexplained ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) that cruised intergalactic spaces at nearly the speed of light. It had always occurred to me that black holes were an excellent candidate for cosmic ray sources. When my research led me to the conclusion that the Dark Matter was in the form of stellar-mass black holes, the Cosmic Ray mystery was settled for me, if not for the astrophysical community.
Now we have a new paper published in Nature Physics that argues compellingly for supermassive black holes as a main source of UHECRs, as well as low energy CRs and high energy CRs.
Of course vast numbers of stellar-mass black holes spitting out CRs like their self-similar SMBH counterparts can only add to the bounty.
Some joke that the cosmos is “Turtles All The Way Down”.
I would bet the farm that it is really “Black Holes All The Way Down”!
If you are searching for nature’s fundamental objects — there you go. And surprise, they come in …, subatomic, stellar, galactic, … sizes. All equally fundamental and unified in a discrete self-similar hierarchy.