EVIDENCE FOR SHOCK ACCELERATION OF HIGH-ENERGY ELECTRONS IN THE SUPERNOVA REMNANT SN1006

High-energy cosmic rays (relativistic heavy nuclei) play an important role in heating interstellar matter in the Milky Way(1,2), and they af fect chemical abundances through collisions with atoms in the interste llar gas(2). Although it has long been thought that these cosmic rays arise from supernovae(3,4), direct evidence for such an association ha s been lacking. Here we report X-ray observations of the remnant of su pernova 1006, made by the ASCA satellite, which indicate that emission from the edges of the remnant shell is dominated by radiation from el ectrons accelerated to energies of similar to 100 TeV within the shock front. Ions in the shell are likely to have been accelerated to simil ar energies, thus giving rise to very-high-energy cosmic rays.