Related papers: Gamma-ray pulsars: a gold mine
The mechanism by which the radiation received from obliquely rotating neutron stars is generated remains an open question half a century after the discovery of pulsars. In contrast, considerable progress has recently been made in…
The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has discovered many gamma-ray pulsars, both as radio-loud objects and radio-quiet or radio-weak pulsars that have been identified through blind period searches. The latter presumably have gamma-ray beams…
The giant flares produced by highly magnetized neutron stars, "magnetars," are the brightest sources of high energy radiation outside our solar system. Serendipitous observations with NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) of the two…
Gamma-ray bursts are the most concentrated explosions in the Universe. They have been detected electromagnetically at energies up to tens of GeV, and it is suspected that they could be active at least up to TeV energies. It is also…
We review electrodynamics of rotating magnetized neutron stars, from the early vacuum model to recent numerical experiments with plasma-filled magnetospheres. Significant progress became possible due to the development of global…
Extraterrestrial gamma-ray astronomy is now a source of new knowledge in the fields of astrophysics, cosmic-ray physics, and the nature of dark matter. The next absolutely necessary step in the development of extraterrestrial high-energy…
Recent results from the PAMELA satellite indicate the presence of a large flux of positrons (relative to electrons) in the cosmic ray spectrum between approximately 10 and 100 GeV. As annihilating dark matter particles in many models are…
Clusters of galaxies and the large scale filaments that connect neighboring clusters are expected to be sites of acceleration of charged particles and sources of non-thermal radiation from radio frequencies to gamma rays. Gamma rays are…
The available data on isolated X-ray pulsars, their wind nebulae, and the supernova remnants which are connected to some of these sources are analyzed. It is shown that electric fields of neutron stars tear off charged particles from the…
The most powerful persistent accelerators in the Universe are jetted active galaxies. Blazars, galaxies whose jets are directed towards Earth, dominate the extragalactic gamma-ray sky. Still, most of the highest-energy particle accelerators…
Well before the radio discovery of pulsars offered the first observational confirmation for their existence (Hewish et al., 1968), it had been suggested that neutron stars might be endowed with very strong magnetic fields of…
It's generally believed that young and rapidly rotating pulsars are important sites of particle's acceleration, in which protons can be accelerated to relativistic energy above the polar cap region if the magnetic moment is antiparallel to…
Since their first discovery in the late 1960s, Gamma-ray bursts have attracted an exponentially growing interest from the international community due to their central role in the most highly debated open questions of the modern research of…
The exclusive Galactic gamma-ray club has opened up to new members. Supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, and massive binary systems hosting a compact object have recently joined the young pulsars as firmly established sources of gamma…
We investigate the electrodynamic structure of a pulsar outer-magnetospheric particle accelerator and the resultant gamma-ray emission. By considering the condition for the accelerator to be self-sustained, we derive how the…
The largest number of known young neutron stars are observed as spin-powered pulsars. While the majority of those are detected at radio frequencies, an increasing number can be studied at other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum as well.…
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…
Active Galactic Nuclei are considered as possible sites of cosmic ray acceleration and some of them have been observed as high energy gamma ray emitters (Blazars). There naturally comes an appealing idea that the acceleration of the highest…
Gamma-ray bursts are known to be sources of high-energy gamma rays, and are likely to be sources of high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos. Following a short review of observations of GRBs at multi-MeV energies and above, the physics of…
Binary neutron stars mergers that are expected to be the most powerful source of energy in the Universe definitely exist in nature, as is proven by the observed behavior of the Hulse-Taylor binary radio pulsar. Though most of energy in such…