The Pierre Auger Observatory

Pierre Auger Observatory: Status Report

The Pierre Auger Observatory is a large international effort to provide measurements of extensive air showers (EAS) initiated in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays with energies above 10 eV , the Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR’s). The explanations for the origin, acceleration processes and composition of the UHECR’s face theoretical and experimental difficulties, due to the extremely low...

Recent results from the Pierre Auger Observatory

The main results from the Auger Observatory are described. A steepening of the spectrum is observed at the highest energies, supporting the expectation that above 4×10 eV the cosmic ray energies are significantly degraded by interactions with the CMB photons (the GZK effect). This is further supported by the correlations observed above 6× 10 eV with the distribution of nearby active galaxies, w...

Angular Resolution of the Pierre Auger Observatory

We studied the angular resolution of the Pierre Auger Detector using data collected from January 2004 to May 2005. The detector consists of two independent components, the fluorescence detector and the surface detector. Hybrid events, observed simultaneously by both components, have smaller reconstruction uncertainties than the events observed with only one component. The hybrid resolution is e...

The Pierre Auger Observatory offline software

The Pierre Auger Observatory aims to discover the nature and origins of the 24 highest energy cosmic rays. The large number of physicists involved in the project and 25 the diversity of simulation and reconstruction tasks pose a challenge for the offline analysis 26 software, not unlike the challenges confronting software for very large high energy physics 27 experiments. Previously we have rep...

Physics Results of the Pierre Auger Observatory