Cosmic rays from magnetically active stellar systems

Abstract

The possibility that cosmic rays arise from magnetically active stellar systems, namely, the five stars, the RS CVn binaries, and the cataclysmic variables, is investigated with a view to understanding the implications of the magnetic activity in stars for cosmic rays. A large number of these mostly binary stars are found to be isotropically distributed within 1 kpc from the sun, and the flaring rate and the energy contents of the flares can easily account for 10 exp 40 erg/s injected into the interstellar medium in the form of cosmic rays. The cosmic rays arising from such systems would have a sun-like composition with an excess of s-process elements compared to the r-process abundances, which agrees well with the observations of high-energy cosmic rays. The organization of galactic cosmic rays according to their first ionization potential is similar to that seen for the solar-energy particles, which suggests that cosmic rays arise from stellar coronae. The correlation between the gamma ray bursts and the cataclysmic variables are used as transitive, and it is shown that the gamma ray bursts can be positionally associated with cosmic rays of energy greater than 3 x 10 exp 19 eV.