Orateur
Description
One of the most serious challenges in high-energy astrophysics is determining the sources of Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR). The advent of high-statistics and high-quality data, most notably from the Pierre Auger Observatory, has profoundly altered our understanding of the high-energy Universe, yet without revealing cosmic-ray sources. We hope to answer this question and identify source classes that best match with existing observational data (direction, energy distribution, and primary mass) by using a MultI-messenger probe of Cosmic Ray Origins (MICRO). A novelty of our approach is a complete study of bursting sources, from modeling selected source types to predicting the UHECR sky as a function of energy and primary mass, including hadronic interactions within the source and propagation down to Earth. Following a review of the observational status of searches for UHECR origins, the MICRO project's progress over its first year of funding will be discussed, along with some of the project's impending expected achievements.
