Related papers: Astrophysical constraints from gamma-ray spectrosc…
Radio spectroscopy offers a number of tools for studying a large variety of astrophysical phenomena, ranging from stars and their environment to interstellar and intergalactic medium, active galactic nuclei (AGN) and distant quasars. Main…
Identifying gamma-ray sources in the Galaxy is hampered by their poor localization, source confusion, and the large variety of potential emitters. Neutron stars and their environment offer various ways to power gamma-ray sources: pulsed…
The determination of the densities of intergalactic photons from the FIR to the UV produced by stellar emission and dust reradiation at various redshifts can provide an independent measure of the star formation history of the universe. High…
Energy in stars is provided by nuclear reactions, which, in many cases, produce radioactive nuclei. When stable nuclei are irradiated by a flux of protons or neutrons, capture reactions push stable matter out of stability into the regime of…
Continuum gamma-ray emission produced by interactions of cosmic rays with interstellar matter and radiation fields is a probe of non-thermal particle populations in galaxies. After decades of continuous improvements in experimental…
The origin of the extragalactic gamma-ray background is a pressing cosmological mystery. The Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope has recently measured the intensity and spectrum of this background; both are substantially different from previous…
The interstellar medium (ISM) has a number of tracers such as the Na I D 5890, 5896 AA absorption lines that are evident in the spectra of galaxies but also in those of individual astrophysical sources such as stars, novae or quasars. Here,…
Dark matter annihilation in Galactic substructure will produce diffuse gamma-ray emission of remarkably constant intensity across the sky, making it difficult to disentangle this Galactic dark matter signal from the extragalactic gamma-ray…
The imaging spectrometer SPI on board ESA's INTEGRAL observatory provides us with an unprecedented view of positron annihilation in our Galaxy. The first sky maps in the 511 keV annihilation line and in the positronium continuum from SPI…
Nuclear physics offers us a powerful tool: using nuclear resonance absorption lines to infer the physical conditions in astrophysical settings which are otherwise difficult to deduce. Present-day technology provides an increase in…
Even 50 years after the discovery of a positron annihilation line from the inner Galaxy, no class of astrophysical sources has emerged as a definitive explanation for both the emission morphology and flux. Positrons produced by dark matter…
After the recent beautiful results on gamma-ray lines obtained with CGRO, the INTEGRAL mission with the imaging-spectrometer SPI will set the next milestone, combining improved sensitivity and angular resolution with a considerable increase…
The International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL), launched in 2002, continues its successful work in observing the sky at energies E>20 keV. The legacy of the mission already includes a large number of discovered or previously…
Gamma-ray absorption due to gamma-gamma-pair creation on cosmological scales depends on the line-of-sight integral of the evolving density of low-energy photons in the Universe, i.e. on the history of the diffuse, isotropic radiation field.…
Observations of annihilation radiation in the Galaxy are briefly reviewed. We summarize astrophysical mechanisms leading to positron production, and recent estimates for production rates from nova and supernova nucleosynthesis in the…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected the gamma-ray glow emanating from the giant radio lobes of the radio galaxy Centaurus A. The resolved gamma-ray image shows the lobes clearly separated from the central active source. In…
We report INTEGRAL/IBIS gamma-ray and VLA radio observations of G0.570-0.018, a diffuse X-ray source recently discovered by ASCA and Chandra in the Galactic center region. Based on its spectrum and morphology, G0.570-0.018 has been proposed…
The observation of the interstellar 1.809 MeV decay-line of radioactive 26Al by the imaging gamma-ray telescope COMPTEL have let to the conclusion, that massive stars and their subsequent core-collapse supernovae are the dominant sources of…
What are the origins of the soft X-ray line emission from non-AGN galaxies? XMM-Newton RGS spectra of nearby non-AGN galaxies (including starforming ones: M82, NGC 253, M51, M83, M61, NGC 4631, M94, NGC 2903, and the Antennae galaxies, as…
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}.…