The effects of discreteness of galactic cosmic rays sources

Abstract

Most studies of GeV Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCR) nuclei assume a steady state/continuous distribution for the sources of cosmic rays, but this distribution is actually discrete in time and in space. The current progress in our understanding of cosmic ray physics (acceleration, propagation), the required consistency in explaining several GCRs manifestation (nuclei, $\gamma$,...) as well as the precision of present and future space missions (e.g. INTEGRAL, AMS, AGILE, GLAST) point towards the necessity to go beyond this approximation. A steady state semi-analytical model that describes well many nuclei data has been developed in the past years based on this approximation, as well as others. We wish to extend it to a time dependent version, including discrete sources. As a first step, the validity of several approximations of the model we use are checked to validate the approach: i) the effect of the radial variation of the interstellar gas density is inspected and ii) the effect of a specific modeling for the galactic wind (linear vs constant) is discussed. In a second step, the approximation of using continuous sources in space is considered. This is completed by a study of time discreteness through the time-dependent version of the propagation equation. A new analytical solution of this equation for instantaneous point-like sources, including the effect of escape, galactic wind and spallation, is presented. Application of time and space discretness to definite propagation conditions and realistic distributions of sources will be presented in a future paper.Comment: final version, 8 figures, accepted in ApJ. A misprint in fig 8 labels has been correcte