Method to Look for Imprints of Ultrahigh Energy Nuclei Sources

Understand

We propose a new method to search for heavy nuclei sources, on top of background, in the Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Ray data.

• We apply this method to the 69 events recently published by the Pierre Auger Collaboration and find a tail of events for which it reconstructs the source at a few degrees from the Virgo galaxy cluster.
• The reconstructed source is located at ~ 8.5 degrees from M87.
• The probability to have such a cluster of events in some random background and reconstruct the source position in any direction of the sky is about 7 x 10^(-3).