No Arabic abstract
The IceCube neutrino discovery presents an opportunity to answer long-standing questions in high-energy astrophysics. For their own sake and relations to other processes, it is important to understand neutrinos arising from the Milky Way, which should have an accompanying flux of gamma rays. Examining Fermi TeV data, and applying other constraints up to >1 PeV, it appears implausible that the Galactic fraction of the IceCube flux is large, though could be present at some level. We address Sgr A*, where the TeV-PeV neutrinos may outrun gamma rays due to gamma-gamma opacity, and further implications, including dark matter and cosmic-ray electrons.
It has been shown that the gamma-ray flux observed by HESS from the J1745-290 Galactic Center source is well fitted as the secondary gamma-rays photons generated from Dark Matter annihilating into Standard Model particles in combination with a simple power law background. The neutrino flux expected from such Dark Matter source has been also analyzed. The main results of such analyses for 50 TeV Dark Matter annihilating into W+W- gauge boson and preliminary results for antiprotons are presented.
The propagation of very high energy gamma-rays ($E>100$~GeV) over cosmological distances is suppressed by pair-production processes with the ubiquitous extra-galactic soft photon background, mainly in the optical to near infra-red. The detailed spectroscopy of gamma-ray emitting blazars has revealed the signature of this absorption process leading to a meaningful measurement of the background photon field which is linked to the star-forming history of the universe. Deviations from the expected absorption have been claimed in the past. Here the status of the observations is summarized, an update on the search for the persisting anomalous transparency is given and discussed.
The steep spectrum of neutrinos measured by IceCube extending from >1 PeV down to ~10 TeV has an energy flux now encroaching on the Fermi isotropic GeV background. We examine several implications starting from source energetics requirements for neutrino production. We show how the environment of extragalactic nuclei can extinguish ~10-100 TeV gamma rays and convert their energy to X-rays for plausible conditions of infrared luminosity and magnetic field, so that the Fermi background is not overwhelmed by cascades. We address a variety of scenarios, such as for acceleration by supermassive black holes and hadronic scenarios, and observations that may help elucidate the neutrinos shadowy origins.
The detection of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) provides a new way to explore sources of cosmic rays. One of the highest energy neutrino events detected by IceCube, tagged as IC35, is close to the UHECR anisotropy region detected by Pierre Auger Observatory. The nearby starburst galaxy (SBG), NGC 4945, is close to this anisotropic region and inside the mean angular error of the IC35 event. Considering the hypernovae contribution located in the SB region of NGC 4945, which can accelerate protons up to $sim 10^{17} , {rm eV}$ and inject them into the interstellar medium, we investigate the origin of this event around this starburst galaxy. We show that the interaction of these protons with the SB regions gas density could explain Fermi-LAT gamma-ray and radio observations if the magnetic fields strength in the SB region is the order of $sim rm mG$. Our estimated PeV neutrino events, in ten years, for this source is approximately 0.01 ($4times10^{-4}$) if a proton spectral index of 2.4 (2.7) is considered, which would demonstrate that IC35 is not produced in the central region of this SBG. Additionally, we consider the superwind region of NGC 4945 and show that protons can hardly be accelerated in it up to UHEs.
The detection of an astrophysical flux of high-energy neutrinos by IceCube is a major step forward in the search for the origin of cosmic rays, as this emission is expected to originate in hadronic interactions taking place in or near cosmic-ray accelerators. No neutrino point sources, or significant correlation with known astrophysical objects, have been identified in the IceCube data so far. The hadronic interactions responsible for the neutrino emission should also lead to the production of high-energy gamma rays. The search for neutrino sources can then be performed by studying the spatial and temporal correlations between neutrino events and very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) gamma rays. We report here on the search for VHE gamma-ray emission with the H.E.S.S. imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) at the reconstructed position of muon neutrino events detected by IceCube. We will provide an up-to-date summary of the extensive program to perform prompt IACT observations of realtime IceCube neutrino event positions. A recent highlight of this program are the H.E.S.S. observations during the broad multi-wavelength campaign that followed the detection of the neutrino event IceCube-170922A arriving from a direction consistent with the location of a flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 in September 2017. Well present the H.E.S.S. observations obtained within ~4h hours of the neutrino detection as well as a complementary search for gamma-ray emission at longer timescales and put them into the multi-wavelength and multi-messenger context.