Recently, LHAASO detected a gamma-ray emission extending beyond 100\, TeV from 4 sources associated to powerful microquasars. We propose that such sources are the main Galactic PeVatrons and investigate their contribution to the proton and gamma-ray fluxes by modeling their entire population. We find that the presence of only 10 active powerful microquasars in the Galaxy at any given time is sufficient to account for the proton flux around the knee and to provide a very good explanation of cosmic-ray and gamma-ray data in a self-consistent picture. The 10\, TeV bump and the 300\, TeV hardening in the cosmic-ray spectrum naturally appear, and the diffuse background measured by LHAASO above a few tens of TeV is accounted for. This supports the paradigm in which cosmic rays around the knee are predominantly accelerated in a very limited number of powerful microquasars.
Kaci et al. (Wed,) studied this question.