The Nature of Unidentified Galactic High-Energy Gamma-Ray Sources

Download or read book The Nature of Unidentified Galactic High-Energy Gamma-Ray Sources written by Alberto Carramiñana and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) instru ment on the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory left as a legacy its Third Catalog of High Energy Gamma-Ray Sources, whose detections include a large number of blazars, some pulsars, the Large Magellanic Cloud and a solar flare. Most of the newly discovered objects - a majority of the catalog -are unidentified sources, with a clearly predominant Galactic population. Are all these radio-quiet pulsars, like Geminga, or is there a novel type of celestial object, awaiting identification? In spite of the limited angular resolution provided by EGRET and COMPTEL, there is still much to learn about unidentified ,-ray sources: correlation studies, multiwavelength observations and theoretical work can provide valuable clues, specially if these efforts are carried out in a coordinated manner. The aim of this workshop, held from October 9 to 11, 2000, at the Instituto N acional de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica, at Tonantzintla, Mexico, was to gather experts on the subject, including observational as tronomers specialized in other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, in an effort to address the question of the Nature of Galactic high-energy gamma-ray sources, both from the theoretical and observational perspec tive, and elaborate schemes for future identification studies which can make use of existing and forthcoming facilities.