Observations of High-Energy Gamma-Ray Emission Toward the Galactic Centre with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

The inner region of the Milky Way is one of the most interesting and complex regions of the gamma-ray sky. The intense interstellar emission and resolved point sources, as well as potential contributions by other sources such as unresolved source populations and dark matter, complicate the interpretation of the data. In this paper the Fermi LAT team analysis of a 15x15 degree region about the Galactic centre is described. The methodology for point-source detection and treatment of the interstellar emission is given. In general, the bulk of the gamma-ray emission from this region is attributable to a combination of these two contributions. However, low-intensity residual emission remains and its characterisation is discussed.

Calculation of Stochastic Heating and Emissivity of Cosmic Dust Grains with Optimization for the Intel Many Integrated Core Architecture

Cosmic dust particles effectively attenuate starlight. Their absorption of starlight produces emission spectra from the near- to far-infrared, which depends on the sizes and properties of the dust grains, and spectrum of the heating radiation field. The near- to mid-infrared is dominated by the emissions by very small grains. Modeling the absorption of starlight by these particles is, however, computationally expensive and a significant bottleneck for self-consistent radiation transport codes treating the heating of dust by stars. In this paper, we summarize the formalism for computing the stochastic emissivity of cosmic dust, which was developed in earlier works, and present a new library HEATCODE implementing this formalism for the calculation for arbitrary grain properties and heating radiation fields. Our library is highly optimized for general-purpose processors with multiple cores and vector instructions, with hierarchical memory cache structure. The HEATCODE library also efficiently runs on co-processor cards implementing the Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) architecture. We discuss in detail the optimization steps that we took in order to optimize for the Intel MIC architecture, which also significantly benefited the performance of the code on general-purpose processors, and provide code samples and performance benchmarks for each step. The HEATCODE library performance on a single Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor (Intel MIC architecture) is approximately 2 times a general-purpose two-socket multicore processor system with approximately the same nominal power consumption. The library supports heterogeneous calculations employing host processors simultaneously with multiple coprocessors, and can be easily incorporated into existing radiation transport codes.

A celestial gamma-ray foreground due to the albedo of small solar system bodies and a remote probe of the interstellar cosmic ray spectrum

We calculate the gamma-ray albedo flux from cosmic-ray (CR) interactions with the solid rock and ice in Main Belt asteroids (MBAs), Jovian and Neptunian Trojan asteroids, and Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) using the Moon as a template. We show that the gamma-ray albedo for the Main Belt, Trojans, and Kuiper Belt strongly depends on the small-body size distribution of each system. Based on an analysis of the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) data we infer that the diffuse emission from the MBAs, Trojans, and KBOs has an integrated flux of less than ~6x10^{-6} cm^{-2} s^{-1} (100-500 MeV), which corresponds to ~12 times the Lunar albedo, and may be detectable by the forthcoming Gamma Ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST). If detected by GLAST, it can provide unique direct information about the number of small bodies in each system that is difficult to assess by any other method. Additionally, the KBO albedo flux can be used to probe the spectrum of CR nuclei at close-to-interstellar conditions. The orbits of MBAs, Trojans, and KBOs are distributed near the ecliptic, which passes through the Galactic center and high Galactic latitudes. Therefore, the asteroid gamma-ray albedo has to be taken into account when analyzing weak gamma-ray sources close to the ecliptic, especially near the Galactic center and for signals at high Galactic latitudes, such as the extragalactic gamma-ray emission. The asteroid albedo spectrum also exhibits a 511 keV line due to secondary positrons annihilating in the rock. This may be an important and previously unrecognized celestial foreground for the INTErnational Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) observations of the Galactic 511 keV line emission including the direction of the Galactic center.