Fermi Large Area Telescope Observations of the Cosmic-Ray Induced gamma-ray Emission of the Earth's Atmosphere

Abstract

We report on measurements of the cosmic-ray induced gamma-ray emission of Earth's atmosphere by the Large Area Telescope onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The LAT has observed the Earth during its commissioning phase and with a dedicated Earth-limb following observation in September 2008. These measurements yielded 6.4 x 10^6 photons with energies >100MeV and ~250hours total livetime for the highest quality data selection. This allows the study of the spatial and spectral distributions of these photons with unprecedented detail. The spectrum of the emission - often referred to as Earth albedo gamma-ray emission - has a power-law shape up to 500 GeV with spectral index Gamma = 2.79+-0.06.

Accepted for publication in PRD

References in corpus (3)

• Cosmic X-ray background and Earth albedo Spectra with Swift/BAT
• INTEGRAL observations of the cosmic X-ray background in the 5-100 keV range via occultation by the Earth
• Fermi LAT Observations of the Vela Pulsar

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