The acceleration of cosmic rays in supernova remnants. I. -ray evidence for cosmic ray intensity variations on the scale of 0.1-3 kiloparsecs

Abstract

The idea of Bhat et al. (1985) that the bulk of cosmic rays below 10 GeV are accelerated in supernova remnants suggests that cosmic rays should also exhibit intensity variations on a scale comparable with the linear size of a representative remnant. Following the general spirit of shock-wave acceleration models. The authors carry out Monte Carlo simulations to predict what this scale should be and then proceed to present corroborative evidence from an autocorrelation analysis of the COS B and SAS II gamma -ray data for the latitude range mod b mod =10-20 degrees ('near Galaxy') and mod b mod <or approximately=5 degrees ('far Galaxy').