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Register a new userIs the stellar system WR 11 a gamma-ray source?
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Authors
Paula Benaglia
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Many early-type stars are in systems; some of them have been indicated as putative high-energy emitters. The radiation is expected to be produced at the region where two stellar winds collide. Compelling evidence of such emission was found only for the colliding-wind binary (CWB) Eta Car, which was associated to a GeV source. Very recently, the closest CWB, WR 11, was proposed as a counterpart of a 6sigma emission excess, measured with the Fermi LAT satellite. We looked for evidence to support or reject the hypothesis that WR 11 is responsible of the gamma-ray excess. Archive radio interferometric data at 1.4 and 2.5 GHz taken with the Australia Telescope Compact Array along sixteen different dates were reduced. The sizes of the field-of-view at 2.5 GHz and of the central region of the Fermi LAT excess are alike. We analyzed the emission of the field of WR 11, characterized the radio sources detected and derived their spectral indices, to investigate their nature. Eight sources with fluxes above 10 mJy were detected at both frequencies. All but one (WR 11) showed negative spectral indices. Four of them were identified with known objects, including WR 11. A fifth source, labeled here S6, could be a promising candidate to produce gamma-ray emission, besides the CWB WR 11.
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Recent reports claiming tentative association of the massive star binary system gamma^2 Velorum (WR 11) with a high-energy gamma-ray source observed by Fermi-LAT contrast the so-far exclusive role of Eta Carinae as the hitherto only detected gamma-ray emitter in the source class of particle-accelerating colliding-wind binary systems. We aim to shed light on this claim of association by providing dedicated model predictions for the nonthermal photon emission spectrum of WR 11. We use three-dimensional magneto-hydrodynamic modeling to trace the structure and conditions of the wind-collision region of WR 11 throughout its 78.5 day orbit, including the important effect of radiative braking in the stellar winds. A transport equation is then solved in the wind-collision region to determine the population of relativistic electrons and protons which are subsequently used to compute nonthermal photon emission components. We find that - if WR 11 be indeed confirmed as the responsible object for the observed gamma-ray emission - its radiation will unavoidably be of hadronic origin owing to the strong radiation fields in the binary system which inhibit the acceleration of electrons to energies suffciently high for observable inverse Compton radiation. Different conditions in wind-collision region near the apastron and periastron configuration lead to significant variability on orbital time scales. The bulk of the hadronic gamma-ray emission originates at a 400 solar radii wide region at the apex.
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Different forms of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) Luminosity Functions are considered on the basis of an explicit physical model. The inferred flux distributions are compared with the observed ones from two samples of GRBs, Swift and Fermi GBM. The best fit parameters of the Luminosity functions are found and the physical interpretations are discussed. The results are consistent with the observation of a comparable number of flat phase afterglows and monotonic decreasing ones.
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