Comment on Correlation of the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays with Nearby Extragalactic Objects.pdf

a r X i v : 0 7 1 1 .4 0 6 0 v 1 [ a s t r o - p h ] 2 6 N o v 2 0 0 7 Comment on “Correlation of the Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays with Nearby Extragalactic Objects” Dmitry Gorbunov, 1 Peter Tinyakov, 1,2 Igor Tkachev, 1 Sergey Troitsky 1? 1 Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 60th October Anniversary Prospect 7a, 117312, Moscow, Russia 2 Service de Physique The?orique, Universite? Libre de Bruxelles, CP225, blv. du Triomphe, B-1050, Bruxelles, Belgium ? E-mail: st@ms2.inr.ac.ru We argue that the data published by the Pierre Auger Collaboration (arXiv:0711.2256) disfavor at 99% confidence level their hypothesis that most of the highest-energy cosmic rays are protons from nearby astrophysical sources, either Active Galactic Nuclei or other objects with a similar spatial distribution. The Pierre Auger Collaboration reported a remarkable correlation (1) between the arrival directions of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) and positions of nearby Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). The correlation was found by scanning over the maximum angular separation, the minimum event energy and the maximum AGN redshift, see Ref. (2) for the details of the method. The best signal was found at the angle of 3.1 ? for the cosmic-ray set consisting of 15 events with reconstructed energies E 5.6 × 1019 eV and for the set of 472 AGN obtained by imposing the cut on the redshift, z ≤ 0.018, in the catalog (3). The correlation was tested with the independent set consisting of 13 events, with the parameters fixed a priori from the first 1 data set. The probability that the correlation has occurred by chance is 1.7 × 10?3 as derived from the independent set. The conclusion was made that the anisotropy of arrival directions is consistent with the hypothesis that “most of the cosmic rays reaching Earth in that energy range are protons from nearby astrophysical sources, either AGN or other objects with a similar spatial distribution.” We refer to this propositio