Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Scientific paper
2010-09-14
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 726, Issue 2, article id. 60 (2011)
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
submitted to ApJ
Scientific paper
10.1088/0004-637X/726/2/60
Employing data collected during the first 25 months' observations by the Fermi-LAT, we describe and subsequently seek to model the very high energy (>300 MeV) emission from the central few parsecs of our Galaxy. We analyze the morphological, spectral and temporal characteristics of the central source, 1FGL J1745.6-2900. Remarkably, the data show a clear, statistically significant signal at energies above 10 GeV, where the Fermi-LAT has an excellent angular resolution comparable to the angular resolution of HESS at TeV energies, which makes meaningful the joint analysis of the Fermi and HESS data. Our analysis does not show statistically significant variability of 1FGL J1745.6-2900. Using the combination of Fermi data on 1FGL J1745.6-2900 and HESS data on the coincident, TeV source HESS J1745-290, we show that the spectrum of the central gamma-ray source is inflected with a relatively steep spectral region matching between the flatter spectrum found at both low and high energies. We seek to model the gamma-ray production in the inner 10 pc of the Galaxy and examine, in particular, cosmic ray (CR) proton propagation scenarios that reproduce the observed spectrum of the central source. We show that a model that instantiates a transition from diffusive propagation of the CR protons at low energy to almost rectilinear propagation at high energies (given a reasonable energy-dependence of the assumed diffusion coefficient) can well explain the spectral phenomenology. In general, however, we find considerable degeneracy between different parameter choices which will only be broken with the addition of morphological information that gamma-ray telescopes cannot deliver given current angular resolution limits.We argue that a future analysis done in combination with higher-resolution radio continuum data holds out the promise of breaking this degeneracy.
Aharonian Felix A.
Chernyakova Maria
Crocker Roland M.
Jones David Ian
Malyshev Denys
No associations
LandOfFree
Galactic center at very high-energies does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.
If you have personal experience with Galactic center at very high-energies, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and Galactic center at very high-energies will most certainly appreciate the feedback.
Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-395864