ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6142-6556
Current Organisation
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 08-09-2022
Abstract: Since the discovery of an excess in gamma rays in the direction of M31, its cause has been unclear. Published interpretations focus on dark matter or stellar related origins. Studies of a similar excess in the Milky Way centre motivate a correlation of the spatial morphology of the signal with the distribution of stellar mass in M31. However, a robust determination of the best theory for the observed excess emission is challenging due to uncertainties in the astrophysical gamma-ray foreground model. We perform a spectro-morphological analysis of the M31 gamma-ray excess using state-of-the-art templates for the distribution of stellar mass in M31 and novel astrophysical foreground models for its sky region. We construct maps for the old stellar populations of M31 based on data from the PAndAS survey and carefully remove the foreground stars. We also produce improved astrophysical foreground models via novel image inpainting techniques based on machine learning methods. Our stellar maps, mimicking the location of a population of millisecond pulsars in the bulge of M31, reach a 5.4σ significance, making them as strongly favoured as the simple phenomenological models usually considered in the literature, e.g. disc-like templates. This detection is robust to generous variations of the astrophysical foreground model. Once the stellar templates are included in the astrophysical model, we show that the dark matter annihilation interpretation of the signal is unwarranted. We demonstrate that about one million unresolved millisecond pulsars naturally explain the observed gamma-ray luminosity per stellar mass, energy spectrum, and stellar bulge-to-disc flux ratio.
Publisher: American Physical Society (APS)
Date: 05-01-2015
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2012
Publisher: Research Square Platform LLC
Date: 28-10-2021
DOI: 10.21203/RS.3.RS-1025965/V1
Abstract: The Fermi Bubbles are giant, γ-ray emitting lobes emanating from the nucleus of the Milky Way [1, 2] discovered in ∼1-100 GeV data collected by the Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope [3]. Previous work [4] has revealed substructure within the Fermi Bubbles that has been interpreted as a signature of collimated outflows from the Galaxy’s super-massive black hole. Here we show that much of the γ-ray emission associated to the brightest region of substructure – the so-called cocoon – is actually due to the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal (Sgr dSph) galaxy. This large Milky Way satellite is viewed through the Fermi Bubbles from the position of the Solar System. As a tidally and ram-pressure stripped remnant, the Sgr dSph has no on-going star formation, but we demonstrate that its γ-ray signal is naturally explained by inverse Compton scattering of cosmic microwave back-ground photons by high-energy electron-positron pairs injected by the dwarf’s millisecond pulsar (MSP) population, combined with these objects’ magnetospheric emission. This finding suggests that MSPs likely produce significant γ-ray emission amongst old stellar populations, potentially confounding indirect dark matter searches in regions such as the Galactic Centre, the Andromeda galaxy, and other massive Milky Way dwarf spheroidals.
Publisher: American Astronomical Society
Date: 2023
Abstract: It was recently proposed that exotic particles can trigger a new stellar instability that is analogous to the e − e + pair instability if they are produced and reach equilibrium in the stellar plasma. In this study, we construct axion instability supernova (AISN) models caused by the new instability to predict their observational signatures. We focus on heavy axion-like particles (ALPs) with masses of ∼400 keV–2 MeV and coupling with photons of g a γ ∼ 10 −5 GeV −1 . It is found that the 56 Ni mass and the explosion energy are significantly increased by ALPs for a fixed stellar mass. As a result, the peak times of the light curves of AISNe occur earlier than those of standard pair-instability supernovae by 10–20 days when the ALP mass is equal to the electron mass. Also, the event rate of AISNe is 1.7–2.6 times higher than that of pair-instability supernovae, depending on the high mass cutoff of the initial mass function.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 05-09-2022
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 22-05-2020
Abstract: Globular cluster progenitors may have been detected by Hubble Space Telescope, and are predicted to be observable with James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ground-based extremely large telescopes with adaptive optics. This has the potential to elucidate the issue of globular cluster formation and the origins of significantly helium-enriched subpopulations, a problem in Galactic astronomy with no satisfactory theoretical solution. Given this context, we use model stellar tracks and isochrones to investigate the predicted observational properties of helium-enriched stellar populations in globular cluster progenitors. We find that, relative to helium-normal populations, helium-enriched (ΔY = +0.12) stellar populations similar to those inferred in the most massive globular clusters, are expected, modulo some rapid fluctuations in the first ∼30 Myr, to be brighter and redder in the rest frame. At fixed age, stellar mass, and metallicity, a helium-enriched population is predicted to converge to being ∼0.40 mag brighter at $\\lambda \\approx 2.0\\, {\\mu \\rm m}$, and to be 0.30-mag redder in the JWST–NIRCam colour (F070W − F200W), and to actually be fainter for $\\lambda \\lesssim 0.50 \\, {\\mu \\rm m}$. Separately, we find that the time-integrated shift in ionizing radiation is a negligible $\\sim \\!5{{\\ \\rm per\\ cent}}$, though we show that the Lyman-α escape fraction could end up higher for helium-enriched stars.
Publisher: IOP Publishing
Date: 20-09-2019
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-03-2018
Location: United States of America
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Shunsaku Horiuchi.