A Measurement of the Spatial Distribution of Diffuse TeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Galactic Plane with Milagro

By A. Abdo, B. Allen, T. Aune, D. Berley, E. Blaufuss, S. Casanova, Chin-wei Chen, B. Dingus, R. Ellsworth, L. Fleysher and 26 more. 2008

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Diffuse γ-ray emission produced by the interaction of cosmic-ray particles with matter and radiation in the Galaxy can be used to probe the distribution of cosmic rays and their sources in different regions of the Galaxy. With its large field of view and long observation time, the Milagro Gamma Ray Observatory is an ideal instrument for surveying large regions of the northern hemisphere sky and for detecting diffuse γ-ray emission at very high energies. Here the spatial distribution and the flux of the diffuse γ-ray emission in the TeV energy range with a median energy of 15 TeV for Galactic longitude between 30° and 110° and between 136° and 216° and for Galactic latitude between –10° and 10° are determined. The measured fluxes are consistent with predictions of the GALPROP model everywhere, except for the Cygnus region (l∊ [ 65°,85°] ). For the Cygnus region, the flux is twice the predicted value. This excess can be explained by the presence of active cosmic-ray sources accelerating hadrons, which interact with the local dense interstellar medium and produce gamma rays through pion decay.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93c62c2245b38db3ba0258222298f8cdd8ee7b11

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

KM3MeT 2.0 Letter of intent for ARCA and ORCA (2016, background): “The observation of diffuse TeV γ-ray emission from the GP [47, 48], which is expected to arise from the same hadronic processes that would produce high-energy neutrinos, strongly supports this hypothesis.”
The 2HWC HAWC Observatory Gamma-Ray Catalog (2017, methodology): “The Milagro and H.E.S.S. experiments measured the TeV diffuse emission in Abdo et al. (2008) and Abramowski et al. (2014).”
A Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique to sample transport and source parameters of Galactic cosmic rays - II. Results for the diffusion model combining B/C and radioactive nuclei (2010, methodology): “The GeV γray diffuse emission is being measured by the Fermi satellite (The Fermi-LAT Collaboration 2009), while the TeV diffuse emission is within reach of ground arrays of Cerenkov Telescopes (e.g., Hess, Aharonian et al. 2006; Milagro, Abdo et al. 2008).”
Teraelectronvolt Astronomy (2010, background): “Indeed the extensive air-shower sampling (EAS) technique has recently produced its first contributions to the catalogue of TeV sources (Abdo et al. 2007a) and proved its usefulness for all sky surveys (at modest sensitivity) and the detection of diffuse emission (Abdo et al. 2008).”
THE LARGE-SCALE COSMIC-RAY ANISOTROPY AS OBSERVED WITH MILAGRO (2008, background): “The second set of tests shows that no false harmonic features are induced from isolated structures (e.g. a square well deficit centered around ∼ 185◦ or the known Galactic equator excess of gamma-rays (Atkins et al. 2005; Abdo et al. 2007, 2008)).”
MILAGRO OBSERVATIONS OF MULTI-TeV EMISSION FROM GALACTIC SOURCES IN THE FERMI BRIGHT SOURCE LIST (2009, methodology): “We can make a conservative estimate by taking the Milagro measurement of the diffuse emission (Abdo et al. 2008) at its highest value, in the inner Galaxy (30◦ < l < 65◦, |b| < 2◦).”
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].”