Speaker
Description
Showers initiated by high-energy cosmic rays can inject secondary
particles into interplanetary space. This will happen best if the
primary particle arrives at an impact parameter such that the column
mass corresponds to a nuclear interaction length. A tangential
shower develops at this point in the atmosphere, and it will then
project early secondary particles of all sorts in the immediate
environment of the object. In the inner heliosphere we should see
this process at work on Earth, Venus, and the Sun, which all have
different cosmic-ray environments and physical properties. The Sun
also generates its own high-energy particles, which indeed produce
gamma-ray events detected by Fermi/LAT at GeV energies. The CRAND
mechanism for Earth's and other planetary magnetospheres is well
known, for example, as a related process. We consider the observability
of tangential showers via gamma-ray or hard X-ray observations,
such as those from Fermi and NuSTAR respectively, and predict the
occurrence of extreme limb brightening as a consequence of these
interactions.
