* Astronomy

The University of Maryland-led Milagro collaboration, comprised of scientists from 16 institutions across the United States, has discovered two nearby regions with an unexpected excess of cosmic rays.
This is the second finding of a source of galactic cosmic rays relatively near Earth announced in the past week. In the November 20 issue of the journal Nature, ATIC an international experiment lead by LSU scientists and conceived by a University of Maryland physicist announced finding an unexpected surplus of cosmic-ray electrons from an unidentified, but relatively close source.
These two results may be due to the same, or different, astrophysical phenomenon, said Jordan Goodman, a University of Maryland professor of physics and principal investigator for Milagro. However, they both suggest the presence of high-energy particle acceleration in the vicinity of the earth. Our new findings [published in the November 24 issue of Physical Review Letters] point to general locations for the localised excesses of cosmic-ray protons observed with the Milagro observatory.

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