Ultra-high energy cosmic ray correlations with Active Galactic Nuclei in the world dataset

TL;DR

This study tests the correlation between ultra-high energy cosmic rays and active galactic nuclei using multiple datasets, finding no significant correlation beyond random chance.

Contribution

It provides a blind test of the AGN correlation hypothesis across diverse datasets, normalizing energies for consistency.

Findings

Number of correlated events matches random background expectations

No significant correlation detected between cosmic rays and AGN

Supports the need for further investigation with larger datasets

Abstract

Pierre Auger collaboration have recently put forward the hypothesis that the arrival directions of the highest energy cosmic rays correlate with the subset of local active galactic nuclei (AGN). We perform a blind test of AGN hypothesis using publicly available event sets collected by Yakutsk, AGASA and HiRes experiments. The consistency of the procedure requires the event energies to be normalized towards the common energy scale. The number of correlating events in resulting data-set is 3 of 21 which is consistent with expected random background.