Igor Moskalenko
Stanford University
Direct measurements of cosmic rays and their possible interpretations
The last two decades have brought spectacular advances in astrophysics of cosmic rays and space- and ground-based astronomy. Launches of missions that employ forefront detector technologies enabled measurements with large effective areas, wide fields of view, and precision that we recently could not even dream of. Meanwhile, interpretation of the individual slices of information about the internal working of the Milky Way provided by such experiments poses challenges to the traditional astrophysical models. New mysteries arise in the composition and spectra of cosmic ray species at low and high energies, in the energy range where we thought the main features were already understood fairly well. This accumulation of unsolved puzzles highlights the peculiarity of the epoch in which we live and means that major breakthroughs are coming. In my presentation, I am going to review the current state of direct measurements of cosmic rays and discuss their possible interpretations.