In the meantime, the Telescope Array team hopes to prove whether the hotspot is real.
However, the Telescope Array team has taken a more catholic approach, looking only for evidence that cosmic rays do not arrive in equal numbers in all directions.
The signal isn't strong enough for scientists to claim a discovery, cautions Pierre Sokolsky of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, one of 125 members of the Telescope Array team.
And 19 of them appear to cluster in a hotspot in the sky about 20° in radius, as Hiroyuki Sagawa, a co-representative for the Telescope Array team from the University of Tokyo, reported today in a press conference at the university.
By running millions of simulations in which they dot the sky with 72 random points, researchers estimate the chances that random cosmic rays could produce such a hotspot at one in 2700, the Telescope Array team explains in a paper in press at The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
What's white on the pope, scarlet on a cardinal, violet on a bishop and can be found stamped with an array of team logos or cartoon characters when found on the heads of Orthodox Jewish boys across New York City?
To my ears, the most appalling part of the story was the way in which Boogaard was able to obtain lethal amounts of Percocet and Vicodin from an array of team doctors, none of whom appeared to know what the others were prescribing.
To create their laser array, the team first deposited a series of alternating layers--called a multilayer--of gallium nitride and aluminum nitride on a small sapphire chip.
We thank the micro-array platform team for the positive samples with a deletion in Chr12q24.1 and duplication in Chr3q21.2.
The authors thank Ruth Jüngling, University of Frankfurt, for technical advice, and the Array-On team for expert help with design of the microarrays.
