Related papers: Galactic annihilation emission from nucleosynthesi…
Assuming Galactic positrons do not go far before annhilating, a difference between the observed 511 keV annihilation flux distribution and that of positron production, expected from beta-plus decay in Galactic iron nucleosynthesis, was…
Observations of a strong and extended positron-electron annihilation line emission in the Galactic center (GC) region by the SPI/INTEGRAL are challenging to the existing models of positron sources in the Galaxy. In this paper, we study the…
We model the annihilation of relic positrons produced in a gamma-ray burst (GRB) after its afterglow has faded. We find that the annihilation signal from at least one GRB remnant in the Milky Way galaxy should be observable with future…
Gamma-ray spectrometers with high spectral resolution have been operated in space since 2002. Major efforts to understand instrumental response and backgrounds are a requird before detailed science interpretations can be derived; by now,…
Positron and electron cosmic rays provide a complementary way to study the galactic environment. The actual cosmic rays experiments, for instance PAMELA and HEAT, have presented very exciting results in this field. The observed positron…
We analyse SPI/INTEGRAL data on the 511 keV line from the Galactic Centre, accumulated over ~6 years of observations. We decompose the X-ray and soft gamma-ray emission of the central part of the Milky Way into a relatively compact "Bulge"…
The center of our Galaxy is a known strong source of electron-positron 511-keV annihilation radiation. Thus far, however, there have been no reliable detections of annihilation radiation outside of the central radian of our Galaxy. One of…
The signature of positron annihilation, namely the 511 keV $\gamma$-ray line, was first detected coming from the direction of the Galactic center in the 1970's, but the source of Galactic positrons still remains a puzzle. The measured flux…
The possibility that the Galactic dark matter is composed of neutralinos that are just above half the $Z^o$ mass is examined, in the context of the Galactic positron excess. In particular, we check if the anomalous bump in the cosmic ray…
By combining OSSE, SMM and TGRS observations of the galactic center region, Purcell et al. (1997) and Cheng et al. (1997) produced the first maps of galactic positron annihilation. That data-set has been augmented with additional data, both…
The observed 511 keV line from the Galactic Bulge is a real challenge for theoretical astrophysics: despite a lot of suggested mechanisms, there is still no convincing explanation and the origin of the annihilated positrons remains unknown.…
Microquasars are stellar-mass black holes accreting matter from a companion star and ejecting plasma jets at almost the speed of light. They are analogues of quasars that contain supermassive black holes of $10^6$ to $10^{10}$ solar masses.…
This work investigates some aspects of the transport of low-energy positrons in the interstellar medium (ISM). We consider resonance interactions with magnetohydrodynamic waves above the resonance threshold. Below the threshold, collisions…
The diffuse continuum emission from the Galactic plane in the energy range 18-1000 keV has been studied using 16 Ms of data from the SPI instrument on INTEGRAL. With such an exposure we can exploit the imaging properties of SPI to achieve a…
We consider the phenomenology of the 511 keV emission in the Galactic bulge, as recently observed by INTEGRAL, and propose a model is which the positrons are produced by gamma-ray bursts (GRB) associated with mini starbursts in the central…
We suggest that the energy source of the observed diffuse gamma-ray emission from the direction of the Galactic center is the Galactic black hole Sgr A*, which becomes active when a star is captured at a rate of $\sim 10^{-5} $ yr^{-1}.…
The positron fraction in cosmic rays was found to be a steadily increasing in function of energy, above $\sim$ 10 GeV. This behaviour contradicts standard astrophysical mechanisms, in which positrons are secondary particles, produced in the…
Since its launch in October 2002, ESA's INTEGRAL observatory has enabled significant advances to be made in the study of Galactic nucleosynthesis. In particular, the imaging Ge spectrometer SPI combines for the first time the diagnostic…
We study the origin of the positron excess observed in the local cosmic-ray spectrum at high energies, and relate it to the cosmic rays and gamma-ray emission across the entire Galaxy. In particular, we explore the hypothesis of a single,…
We have made a calculation of the propagation of positrons from dark-matter particle annihilation in the Galactic halo in different models of the dark matter halo distribution using our 3D code, and present fits to our numerical propagation…