Related papers: The Galactic gamma-ray club
One of the main purposes in $\gamma$-ray astronomy is linked to the origin of Galactic cosmic rays. Unlike cosmic rays, $\gamma$ rays can be used to probe their production sites in the Galaxy and to find which type of astrophysical sources…
A long standing problem in high energy astrophysics is the nature of galactic accelerators of particles with energies above PeV. Such objects are sources of galactic cosmic rays and can produce PeV-regime photons observed by ground-based…
The last decade has been dense with new developments in the search for the sources of Galactic cosmic rays. Some of these developments have confirmed the tight connection between cosmic rays and supernovae in our Galaxy, through the…
Based on the expected population of core collapse supernova remnants and the huge number of detected pulsars in the Galaxy, still representing only a fraction of the real population, pulsar wind nebulae are likely to constitute one of the…
The undisputed galactic origin of cosmic rays at energies below the so-called knee implies an existence of a nonthemal population of galactic objects which effectively accelerate protons and nuclei to TeV-PeV energies. The distinct…
In the past few years, gamma-ray astronomy has entered a golden age. At TeV energies, only a handful of sources were known a decade ago, but the current generation of ground-based imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes has increased this…
Observational gamma-ray astronomy was born some forty years ago, when small detectors were flown in satellites, following a decade of theoretical predictions of its potential to discover the origin of cosmic rays via the pi-zero decay…
It has long been speculated that supernova remnants represent a major source of cosmic rays in the Galaxy. Observations over the past decade have ceremoniously unveiled direct evidence of particle acceleration in SNRs to energies…
The origin of the high-energy gamma-ray emission from the Milky Way center is still unclear and debated because of the impact of systematics afflicting the measurements from current experiments. Several theories and phenomenological models…
Some massive binaries should contain energetic pulsars which inject relativistic leptons from their inner magnetospheres and/or pulsar wind regions. If the binary system is compact enough, then these leptons can initiate inverse Compton…
Observations using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT) have found a significant gamma-ray excess surrounding the center of the Milky Way (GC). One possible interpretation of this excess invokes gamma-ray emission from an undiscovered…
It has been known for over 30 years that Galactic globular clusters (GCs) are overabundant by orders of magnitude in bright X-ray sources per unit mass relative to the disk population. Recently a quantitative understanding of this…
Presently there are several classes of detected gamma-ray extragalatic sources. They are mostly associated to active galactic nuclei (AGN) and (at soft gamma rays) to gamma-ray bursts (GRB), but not only. Active galactic nuclei consist of…
It has been suggested that the GeV excess, observed from the region surrounding the Galactic Center, might originate from a population of millisecond pulsars that formed in globular clusters. With this in mind, we employ the publicly…
The population of binary systems known to emit in the GeV and TeV bands consists of only a few firmly identified Galactic sources. These rare objects constitute extreme particle accelerators operating under varying, but regularly repeating,…
Gamma-ray binaries are thought to be composed of a young pulsar in orbit around a massive O or Be star, with their gamma-ray emission powered by pulsar spindown. The number of such systems in our Galaxy is not known. We aim to estimate the…
Observations with the current generation of very-high-energy gamma-ray telescopes have revealed an astonishing variety of particle accelerators in the Milky Way, such as supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, and binary systems. The…
As of early 2009, latest results on Galactic sources (mainly shell-type and plerionic supernova remnants), as observed in the very-high-energy gamma-ray domain, are reviewed. A particular attention is given to those obtained with the…
X-ray binaries are composed of a normal star in orbit around a neutron star or stellar-mass black hole. Radio and X-ray observations have led to the presumption that some X-ray binaries called microquasars behave as scaled down active…
Population studies of unidentified EGRET sources suggest that there exist at least three different populations of galactic gamma-ray sources. One of these populations is formed by young objects distributed along the galactic plane with a…