  We consider the hypothesis that cosmic rays are emitted from the surfaces of
neutron stars by a process of evaporation from an internal nuclear liquid to a
dilute external gas which constitutes the "vacuum". On this basis, we find an
inverse power in the energy distribution with a power law exponent of 2.701178
in excellent agreement with the experimental value of 2.7. The heat of nuclear
matter evaporation via the entropy allows for the computation of the exponent.
The evaporation model employed is based on the entropy considerations of Landau
and Fermi that have been applied to the liquid drop model of evaporation in a
heavy nucleus excited by a collision. This model provides a new means of
obtaining power law distributions for cosmic ray energy distributions and,
remarkably, an actual value for the exponent which is in agreement with
experiment and explains the otherwise puzzling smoothness of the cosmic ray
energy distribution over a wide range of energies without discontinuities due
to contributions from different sources required by current models.
