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Last Updated: Sunday, September 01, 2013, 11:30  

Washington: Scientists have claimed that using data from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole may help unravel the mystery of exactly how and where these cosmic rays are produced.

University of Delaware physicist Bakhtiyar Ruzybayev is the study's corresponding author.

Cosmic rays are known to reach energies above 100 billion giga-electron volts (1011 GeV). The data reported in this latest paper cover the energy range from 1.6 times 106 GeV to 109 GeV.

Researchers are particularly interested in identifying cosmic rays in this interval because the transition from cosmic rays produced in the Milky Way Galaxy to "extragalactic" cosmic rays, produced outside our galaxy, is expected to occur in this energy range.

Ruzybayev pointed out that the cosmic-ray energy spectrum does not follow a simple power law between the "knee" around 4 PeV (peta-electron volts) and the "ankle" around 4 EeV (exa-electron volts), as previously thought, but exhibits features like hardening around 20 PeV and steepening around 130 PeV.

IceTop consists of 81 stations in its final configuration, covering an area of one square kilometer on the South Pole surface above the detectors of IceCube, which are buried over a mile deep in the ice.

The research has been published online in Physical Review D, a leading journal in elementary particle physics.

ANI