We investigate the propagation of ultraheavy (UH) nuclei as ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs). We show that their energy loss lengths at 300~EeV are significantly longer than those of protons and intermediate nuclei, and that the highest-energy cosmic rays with energies beyond ~100~EeV, including the Amaterasu particle, may originate from such UH-UHECRs. We derive constraints on the contribution of UH-UHECR sources, and find that they are consistent with energy generation rate densities of UHECRs from collapsars and neutron star mergers.
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Zhang et al. (2024) studied this question.
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