SPACE AND COSMIC RAY PHYSICS SEMINAR

University of Maryland
Atlantic Building, Room 2400 4:30 PM Monday, September 12, 2005
Coffee, Tea & Snacks 4:15-4:30 PM

Peter Biermann
Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and University of Bonn, Germany

Overview of Galactic Cosmic Rays, Status and Next Steps

With the first results from the new generation of TeV Cerenkov telescopes we again face the challenge of trying to understand the origin of Galactic cosmic rays. I will review the various conflicting arguments, and present some propagation calculations for the highest energy Galactic cosmic rays. It is likely that gamma ray observations will strongly constrain the possible sites of origin, but high precision spectra of secondary nuclei could do even more.