The relaxation of a photon bath to thermal equilibrium via Compton scattering with electrons is described in the Kompaneets equation (1956). mostly known from studies astrophysical plasmas, for its convergence Planck distribution and possible corrections that law cosmic microwave background, most notably Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. We revisit derivation emphasizing structure as Kramers-Moyal diff...

Cosmic rays have been observed up to energies 10 times larger than those of the best particle accelerators. Studies of astrophysical particles (hadrons, neutrinos and photons) at their highest observed energies have implications for fundamental physics as well as astrophysics. Thus, the cosmic high energy frontier is the nexus to new particle physics. This overview discusses recent advances bei...

all living organisms are exposed to ionizing radiation comprising cosmic rays coming from outer space, terrestrial nuclides occurring in the earth’s crust, building materials, air, water and foods and in the human body itself. the exposures are constant and uniform for all individuals everywhere including the dose from ingestion of 40k in food. cosmic rays are, more intense at higher altitudes,...

background: the exposure of human being to ionize radiation from natural sources is a continuing, inescapable feature of life on earth. direct measurement of absorbed dose rates in air has been carried out in many countries of the world during the last few decades. such investigations can be useful for assessment of public dose rates, the performance of epidemiological studies, and keeping refe...

We consider a generalized statistical mechanics model for the creation process of cosmic rays which takes into account local temperature fluctuations. This model yields Tsallis statistics for the cosmic ray spectrum. It predicts an entropic index q given by q = 11/9 at largest energies (equivalent to a spectral index of α = 5/2), and an effective temperature given by 59TH , where kTH ≈ 180 MeV ...

Recent developments in string theory suggest that cosmic strings could be formed at the end of brane inflation. Supergravity provides a realistic model to study the properties of strings arising in brane inflation. Whilst the properties of cosmic strings in flat space-time have been extensively studied there are significant complications in the presence of gravity. We study the effects of gravi...

We present new observations of the isotopic composition of low-energy He, C, N, 0, and Ne nuclei. The observations cover the energy interval from ,...., 5 to 30 MeV per nucleon, the energy range where the "anomalous cosmic ray" fluxes of He, N, 0, and Ne have been observed. We compare the isotopic composition of the anomalous cosmic rays with that of higher-energy galactic cosmic rays in an eff...

Strong evidence exists for the presence of powerful jets in the Low/Hard state of black hole candidate X-ray binaries, earning them the additional nomenclature “microquasars”. In several of these sources, jets have been directly imaged, but all sources in the Low/Hard state show the flatto-inverted radio spectrum which is the characteristic signature of optically thick synchrotron jet emission....

We show that the luminosity of a star forming galaxy is capped by the production and subsequent expulsion of cosmic rays from its interstellar medium. By defining an Eddington luminosity in cosmic rays, we show that the star formation rate of a given galaxy is limited by its mass content and the cosmic ray mean free path. When the cosmic ray luminosity and pressure reaches a critical value as a...

We show that the expected composition of cosmic rays accelerated from the erosion products of fast supernova grains in the hot interstellar medium (HISM) of ejecta enriched superbubbles, where the bulk ( 85%) of Galactic supernovae occur, is consistent with the currently available cosmic ray data. In particular, we show that if the cosmic ray metals come from the sputtering of fast refractory g...