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Transient Gamma Ray Spectrometer Measurements of Gamma-Ray Lines from Novae. II. Constraining the Galactic Nova Rate from a Survey of the Southern Sky during 1995-1997

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 نشر من قبل Mike Harris
 تاريخ النشر 2000
  مجال البحث فيزياء
والبحث باللغة English
 تأليف M.J. Harris




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The good energy resolution (3--4 keV FWHM) of the Transient Gamma Ray Spectrometer (TGRS) on board the WIND spacecraft makes it sensitive to Doppler-shifted outbursts of 511 keV electron-positron annihilation radiation, the reason being that the Doppler shift causes the cosmic line to be slightly offset from a strong instrumental background 511 keV line at rest, which is ubiquitous in space environments. Such a cosmic line (blueshifted) is predicted to arise in classical novae due to the annihilation of positrons from $beta$-decay on a timescale of a few hours in an expanding envelope. A further advantage of TGRS - its broad field of view, containing the entire southern ecliptic hemisphere - has enabled us to make a virtually complete and unbiased 3-year search for classical novae at distances up to ~1 kpc. We present negative results of this search, and estimate its implications for the highly-uncertain Galactic classical nova rate and for future space missions.

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The Transient Gamma Ray Spectrometer (TGRS) on board the WIND spacecraft has spent most of the interval 1995-1997 in a high-altitude orbit where gamma-ray backgrounds are low. Its high-resolution Ge spectrometer is thus able to detect weak lines whic h are slightly offset from stronger background features. One such line is predicted from nucleosynthesis in classical novae, where beta-decays on a time-scale of a few hours in an expanding envelope produce positrons that annihilate to generate a line which is blueshifted by a few keV away from the background annihilation line at 511 keV. The broad TGRS field of view contained five known Galactic novae during 1995 January - 1997 June, and we have searched the spectra taken around the times of these events for the blueshifted nova annihilation line. Although no definite detections were made, the method is shown to be sensitive enough to detect novae occurring on ONeMg-rich white dwarfs out to about 2.5 kpc.
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