Related papers: Positron Annihilation in the Galaxy
Diffuse 511 keV line emission, from the annihilation of cold positrons, has been observed in the direction of the Galactic Centre for more than 30 years. The latest high-resolution maps of this emission produced by the SPI instrument on…
The Galactic positrons, as observed by their annihilation gamma-ray line at 0.511 MeV, are difficult to account for with astrophysical sources. It has been proposed that they are produced instead by dark matter annihilation or decay in the…
Observations of the Milky Way by the SPI/INTEGRAL satellite have confirmed the presence of a strong 511 KeV gamma-ray line emission from the bulge, which require an intense source of positrons in the galactic center. These observations are…
Positron annihilation radiation from the Galaxy has been observed by the OSSE, SMM and TGRS instruments. Improved spectral modeling of OSSE observations has allowed studies of the distribution of both positron annihilation radiation…
More than 10^43 positrons annihilate every second in the centre of our Galaxy yet, despite four decades of observations, their origin is still unknown. Many candidates have been proposed, such as supernovae and low mass X-ray binaries.…
The positron emissivity of the Galactic bulge and disk, resulting from radioactivity of SNIa, is reassessed in the light of a recent evaluation of the SNIa rate. It is found that the disk may supply more positrons than required by recent…
Positron annihilation line at 511~keV is a known component of the gamma-ray diffuse emission. It is believed to be produced in the Galaxy, but there could be possible extragalactic contribution as well. E.g., positrons can be produced in…
The origin of the diffuse gamma-ray background in the range from hundreds keV to several MeV is not known conclusively. From current models and observations it is believed that, at least partially, this background is formed by blazars and…
We want to estimate whether the positrons produced by the beta plus decay of 26Al, 44Ti and 56Ni synthesised in massive stars and supernovae are sufficient to explain the 511 keV annihilation emission observed in our Galaxy. Such a…
Both diffuse high energy gamma-rays and an extended electron-positron annihilation line emission have been observed in the Galactic Center (GC) region. Although X-ray observations indicate that the galactic black hole Sgr A$^*$ is inactive…
The IBIS imager on board the INTEGRAL satellite, thanks to the large field of view and good sensitivity, gave us a unique opportunity to search for possible 511 keV point sources either previously unknown or associated to known objects such…
The electron-positron annihilation spectrum observed by SPI/INTEGRAL during deep Galactic Center region exposure is reported. The line energy (510.954$\pm$0.075 keV) is consistent with the unshifted annihilation line. The width of the…
The large intensity of greater than 10 GeV positrons which apparently come from sources outside the Earth-Sun system observed recently by many spacecraft (PAMELA, FERMI, AMS2) is still a mystery with broad implications. In our attempts to…
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…
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…
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"…
We present a spectral analysis of the e+e- annihilation emission from the Galactic Centre region based on the first year of measurements made with the spectrometer SPI of the INTEGRAL mission. We have found that the annihilation spectrum…
The anomalous bump in the cosmic ray positron to electron ratio at $10 GeV$ can be explained as being a component from a point source that was originally harder than the primary electron background and degrades due to synchrotron and…
Two different model-independent mapping techniques have been applied to OSSE, SMM, TGRS and balloon data and reveal a feature in the 0.511 MeV electron-positron annihilation radiation pattern of our galaxy centered roughly at l=-2 deg. and…
The origin and properties of the source of positrons annihilating in the Galactic Center is still a mystery. One of the criterion, which may discriminate between different mechanisms of positron production there, is the positron energy…