Production of TeV Gamma Radiation in the Vicinity of the Supermassive Black Hole in the Giant Radio Galaxy M87
By A. Neronov, F. Aharonian. 2007
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Although the giant radio galaxy M87 harbors many distinct regions of broadband nonthermal emission, the recently reported fast variability of TeV γ-rays from M87, on a timescale of days, strongly constrains the range of speculations concerning the possible sites and scenarios of particle acceleration responsible for the observed TeV emission. A natural production site of this radiation is the immediate vicinity of the central supermassive black hole (BH). Because of its low bolometric luminosity, the nucleus of M87 can be effectively transparent for γ-rays up to an energy of 10 TeV, which makes this source an ideal laboratory for the study of particle acceleration processes close to the BH event horizon. We critically analyze different possible radiation mechanisms in this region and argue that the observed very high energy γ-ray emission can be explained as the inverse Compton emission of ultrarelativistic electron-positron pairs produced through the development of an electromagnetic cascade in the BH magnetosphere. We demonstrate, through detailed numerical calculations of acceleration and radiation of electrons in the magnetospheric vacuum gap, that this "pulsar magnetosphere-like" scenario can satisfactorily explain the main properties of the TeV γ-ray emission from M87.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aa218d3783c9e487116d31378163d6b65e40ea5d
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Citations in the corpus
- Cosmological Magnetic Fields: Their Generation, Evolution and Observation (2013, methodology): “A ”natural” upper limit for the energy of γ-rays produced by blazars is the energy at which the VHE γ-rays can not escape from the blazar host galaxy because of pair production on the interstellar radiation field (ISRF) inside the host galaxy.”
- FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE VIEW OF THE CORE OF THE RADIO GALAXY CENTAURUS A (2010, background): “The Fermi-LAT collaboration has reported70 the detections of NGC 1275 (Per A; Abdo et al. 2009b), M87 (Abdo et al. 2009d), and Cen A71 (Abdo et al. 2009c).”
- Spine–sheath layer radiative interplay in subparsec‐scale jets and the TeV emission from M87 (2008, background): “…observed by H.E.S.S. put strong limits to the size of the source (R < c∆t δ ≃ 5×1015δ cm, whereδ = [Γ(1−β cos θ)]−1 is the relativistic Doppler factor,θ is the viewing angle and∆t ∼ 2 days), which seems difficult to accomplish in this scenario (e.g. Neronov & Aharonian 2007; Levinson 2007).”