Discovery of TeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy

By A. Abdo, B. Allen, D. Berley, E. Blaufuss, S. Casanova, C. Chen, D. Coyne, R. Delay, B. Dingus, R. Ellsworth and 30 more. 2006

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The diffuse gamma radiation arising from the interaction of cosmic-ray particles with matter and radiation in the Galaxy is one of the few probes available to study the origin of the cosmic rays. Data from the Milagro gamma-ray observatory—a water Cerenkov detector that continuously views ~2 sr of the overhead sky—shows that the brightest extended region in the entire northern sky is the Cygnus region of the Galactic plane. The TeV image of the Cygnus region contains at least one new source, MGRO J2019+37, which is 10.9 σ above the isotropic background, as well as correlations with the matter density in the region. However, the gamma-ray flux from the Cygnus region (after excluding MGRO J2019+37) as measured at ~12 TeV exceeds that predicted from a model of cosmic-ray production and propagation. This observation indicates the existence of either hard-spectrum cosmic-ray sources and/or unresolved sources of TeV gamma rays in the region.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0cc7e0520e580599cd859d936667433e9aed4ed1

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Citations in the corpus

MILAGRO OBSERVATIONS OF MULTI-TeV EMISSION FROM GALACTIC SOURCES IN THE FERMI BRIGHT SOURCE LIST (2009, methodology): “Six of these are associated with sources or candidates from the first Milagro survey of the Galactic plane (Abdo et al. 2007b).”
Sensitivity of the high altitude water Cherenkov detector to sources of multi-TeV gamma rays (2013, unknown): “As a result, the experiment was used to discover new Galactic sources of TeV gamma rays [7], diffuse emission from the Galactic plane [8,9], and measure an anisotropy in the arrival direction distribution of charged cosmic rays [10,11].”
Inverse Compton Origin of the Hard X-Ray and Soft Gamma-Ray Emission from the Galactic Ridge (2008, background): “In turn, since most of the diffuse γ-ray emission between ∼10 GeV – 10 TeV is produced via IC scattering of primary electrons on the same starlight and infrared photons, this provides a connection to observations of diffuse emission at TeV energies by HESS (Aharonian et al. 2006) and MILAGRO (Abdo e”
A Measurement of the Spatial Distribution of Diffuse TeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Galactic Plane with Milagro (2008, methodology): “More recent measurements of the diffuse emission near 12 TeV from the Cygnus region of the Galaxy (Abdo et al. 2007a) also show an excess when compared to predictions of GALPROP, 1 Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC. 2 Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA. 3 University…”