English

A pilot search for MeV gamma-ray emission from five galaxy clusters using archival COMPTEL data

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-05-03 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We search for MeV gamma-ray emission between 0.75-30 MeV from five galaxy clusters, viz. Coma, VIRGO, SPT-CL J2012-5649, Bullet, and El Gordo, using archival data from the COMPTEL telescope. For this purpose we use three search templates: point source, radial disk and radial Gaussian. We do not detect any signals from Coma, SPT-CL J2012-5649, Bullet and El Gordo clusters with the 95\% c.l. photon energy flux limit 1010 erg/cm2/s\sim 10^{-10} ~\rm{erg /cm^2/s} . For VIRGO, we detect a non-zero signal between 0.92 to 1.63 MeV having marginal significance of about 2.5σ2.5\sigma, with the observed energy flux 109 ergs/cm2/s \sim 10^{-9}~\rm{ergs/cm^2/s}. However, we do not confirm the previously reported evidence in literature for a gamma-ray line from Coma and VIRGO clusters between 5-7 MeV.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.13240,
  title  = {A pilot search for MeV gamma-ray emission from five galaxy clusters using archival COMPTEL data},
  author = {Siddhant Manna and Shantanu Desai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.13240},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

9 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in JCAP

R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:25:29.748Z