Related papers: Shining light through the Sun
A new series of Earth occultation observations has been started in 2012 to refine the determination of the cosmic X-ray background by the INTEGRAL mission. We show here that the new detector lightcurves in the 3 to 160 keV range differ from…
We show that solar neutrino experiments set an upper limit of 7.8% (7.3% including the recent KamLAND measurements) to the fraction of energy that the Sun produces via the CNO fusion cycle, which is an order of magnitude improvement upon…
Cosmic-ray protons with energies above $10^{16}$ eV passing near the Sun may interact with photons emitted by the Sun and be excited to a $\Delta^+$ resonance. When the $\Delta^+$ decays, it produces pions which further decay to muons and…
Recently the PVLAS collaboration reported the observation of a rotation of linearly polarized laser light induced by a transverse magnetic field -- a signal being unexpected within standard QED. In this review, we emphasize two mechanisms…
The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has been surveying the sky in gamma rays from 30 MeV to more than 300 GeV since August 2008. Fermi is the only mission able to detect high energy > few hundreds MeV emission from the Sun during the new…
A major open issue concerning the active Sun is the effectiveness with which magnetic reconnection accelerates electrons in flares. A paper published by {\em{Nature}} in 2022 used microwave observations to conclude that the Sun is an almost…
Very high energy (VHE) gamma-rays undergo pair production with low energy photons of background radiation fields. This leads to an attenuation of the primary gamma-ray flux of extragalactic sources in the interaction with the extragalactic…
Secluded dark matter models, in which WIMPs annihilate first into metastable mediators, can present novel indirect detection signatures in the form of gamma rays and fluxes of charged particles arriving from directions correlated with the…
The PVLAS signal has renewed the interest in light bosons coupled to the electromagnetic field. However, astrophysical bounds coming from the lifetime of the sun and the CAST experiment are seemingly in conflict with this result. We discuss…
Dark matter annihilating in our Galaxy's halo and elsewhere in the universe is expected to generate a diffuse flux of gamma rays, potentially observable with next generation satellite-based experiments, such as GLAST. In this article, we…
Is the Sun likely to have a more opaque interior than previously thought? The solar oxygen (or abundance) problem can be solved with higher interior opacities, reconciling abundance analyses based on 3D convective atmospheres with the…
INTEGRAL is a hard X-ray/gamma-ray observatory for astrophysics (ESA) covering photon energies from 15 keV to 10 MeV. It was launched in 2002 and since then the BGO detectors of the Anti-Coincidence shield (ACS) of the SPI spectrometer have…
The LHC newly-discovered resonant structures around 7 GeV, such as the $X(6900)$, could be responsible for the observed excess in light-by-light scattering between 5 and 10 GeV. We show that the ATLAS data for light-by-light scattering may…
The CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) has extended its search for solar axions by using 3He as a buffer gas. At T=1.8 K this allows for larger pressure settings and hence sensitivity to higher axion masses than our previous measurements…
The axion could be used as a probe for extra dimensions. In large extra dimensions, besides the QCD axion one obtains an infinite tower of massive Kaluza-Klein (KK) states. We describe the processes of KK axions production in the Sun via…
The status of the solar axion search with the CERN Axion Solar Telescope (CAST) will be discussed. Results from the first part of CAST phase II where the magnet bores were filled with 4He gas at variable pressure in order to scan axion…
Very recently, HAWC observatory discovered the high-energy gamma ray emission from the solar disk during the quiescent stage of the Sun, extending the Fermi-LAT detection of intense, hard emission between 0.1 - 200 GeV to TeV energies. The…
The PVLAS collaboration has announced recently the observation dichroism and birefringence of vacuum permeated by a intense magnetic field. Both are typical predictions of the existence of light particles that, as the QCD axion, interact…
Recently, tentative evidence for an excess of gamma rays at energies around 130 GeV has been reported from analyses of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The excess is potentially of great interest, as it could be associated…
Dark matter capture and annihilation in the Sun can produce detectable high-energy neutrinos, providing a probe of the dark matter-proton scattering cross section. We consider the case when annihilation proceeds via long-lived dark…