The prototype X-ray binary GX 339–4: using TeV γ-rays to assess LMXBs as Galactic cosmic ray accelerators
Abstract
Since the discovery of cosmic rays (CRs) over a century ago, their origin remains an open question. Galactic CRs with energy up to the knee (10¹⁵ eV) are considered to originate from supernova remnants, but this scenario has recently been questioned due to lack of TeV γ-ray counterparts in many cases. Extragalactic CRs, on the other hand, are thought to be associated with accelerated particles in the relativistic jets launched by supermassive accreting black holes at the centre of galaxies. Scaled down versions of such jets have been detected in X-ray binaries hosting a stellar black hole (BHXBs). In this work, we investigate the possibility that the smaller scale jets in transient outbursts of low-mass BHXBs could be sources of Galactic CRs. To better test this scenario, we model the entire electromagnetic spectrum of such sources focusing on the potential TeV regime, using the 'canonical' low-mass BHXB GX 339–4 as a benchmark. Taking into account both the leptonic radiative processes and the γ-rays produced via neutral pion decay from inelastic hadronic interactions, we predict the GeV and TeV γ-ray spectrum of GX 339–4 using lower frequency emission as constraints. Based on this test-case of GX 339–4, we investigate whether other, nearby low-mass BHXBs could be detected by the next-generation very-high-energy γ-ray facility the Cherenkov Telescope Array, which would establish them as additional and numerous potential sources of CRs in the Galaxy.
Additional Information
© 2022 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) Accepted 2022 January 3. Received 2022 January 3; in original form 2021 March 19. We would like to thank K. Chatterjee for many fruitful conversations on jet physics and A. López-Oramas for the insightful discussion on γ-ray Astronomy. DK, SM, and ML are grateful for support from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) VICI grant (no. 639.043.513). CC acknowledges support from the Swedish Research Council (VR). RMTC acknowledges support from NASA grant NNG08FD60C. This research made use of ASTROPY (http://www.astropy.org), a community-developed core PYTHON package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018), MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007), NUMPY (Oliphant 2006), SCIPY (Virtanen et al. 2020), ISIS functions (ISISscripts) provided by ECAP/Remeis observatory and MIT (http://www.sternwarte.unierlangen.de/isis/), and the CTA instrument response functions provided by the CTA Consortium and Observatory (see http://www.cta-observatory.org/science/cta-performance/ for more details). DATA AVAILABILITY. All observational data in this paper are publicly available (see Table 1). The output of our model and the plotting scripts are available in Zenodo, at https://dx.doi.org/.Attached Files
Published - stac004.pdf
Accepted Version - 2201.02379.pdf
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Additional details
- Alternative title
- The prototype X-ray binary GX 339-4: using TeV gamma-rays to assess LMXBs as Galactic cosmic ray accelerators
- Eprint ID
- 114124
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220329-55502504
- 639.043.513
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO)
- Swedish Research Council
- NNG08FD60C
- NASA
- Created
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2022-03-29Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-07-25Created from EPrint's last_modified field