Strong astrophysical shocks as universal accelerators of charged particles Original Research Article

As a rule, the shock compression controls the spectrum of diffusively accelerated particles. We argue that this is not so if the backreaction of these particles of the shock structure is significant. We present a self-similar solution in which the accelerated particles change the flow structure near the shock so strongly that the total shock compression may become very large. Despite this, the energy spectrum behind the shock is close to E−32 independently of compression.