Detection of Gamma-Ray Emission from the Vela Pulsar Wind Nebula with AGILE
arXiv:0912.2921 · doi:10.1126/science.1183844
Abstract
Pulsars are known to power winds of relativistic particles that can produce bright nebulae by interacting with the surrounding medium. These pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) are observed in the radio, optical, x-rays and, in some cases, also at TeV energies, but the lack of information in the gamma-ray band prevents from drawing a comprehensive multiwavelength picture of their phenomenology and emission mechanisms. Using data from the AGILE satellite, we detected the Vela pulsar wind nebula in the energy range from 100 MeV to 3 GeV. This result constrains the particle population responsible for the GeV emission, probing multivavelength PWN models, and establishes a class of gamma-ray emitters that could account for a fraction of the unidentified Galactic gamma-ray sources.
Accepted by Science; first published online on December 31, 2009 in Science Express. Science article and Supporting Online Material are available at http://www.sciencemag.org
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- Fermi Large Area Telescope Bright Gamma-ray Source List
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Cited by in corpus (26)
- The Second Fermi Large Area Telescope Catalog of Gamma-ray Pulsars
- Pulsar-Wind Nebulae: Recent Progress in Observations and Theory
- Pulsar wind nebulae with bow shocks: non-thermal radiation and cosmic ray leptons
- Probing the extent of the non-thermal emission from the Vela X region at TeV energies with H.E.S.S
- Fermi-LAT Search for Pulsar Wind Nebulae around gamma-ray Pulsars
- Gamma-ray Pulsar Revolution
- Fermi Large Area Telescope observations of the Vela-X Pulsar Wind Nebula
- The Vela-X Pulsar Wind Nebula revisited with 4 years of Fermi-Large Area Telescope observations
- Fermi Detection of the Pulsar Wind Nebula HESS J1640-465
- Discovery of the source HESS J1356-645 associated with the young and energetic PSR J1357-6429
- Gamma-ray Emission from the Vela Pulsar Modeled with the Annular Gap and Core Gap
- The Vela and Geminga pulsars in the mid-infrared
- The Second AGILE Catalog of Gamma-Ray Sources
- Extended hard X-ray emission from the Vela pulsar wind nebula
- Agile Observations of the "Soft" Gamma-Ray Pulsar PSR B1509-58
- Suzaku Detection of Diffuse Hard X-Ray Emission outside Vela X
- High energy gamma-ray emission from compact galactic sources in the context of observations with the next generation Cherenkov Telescope Arrays
- Gamma Ray polarimetry; a new window for the non-thermal Universe
- Consecutive Bright Pulses in the Vela Pulsar
- Detection of continuum radio emission associated with Geminga
- Multiwavelength Observations of Pulsar Wind Nebulae
- AGILE study of the gamma-ray emission from the SNR G78.2+2.1 (Gamma Cygni)
- Search of MeV-GeV counterparts of TeV sources with AGILE in pointing mode
- AGILE results on relativistic outflows above 100 MeV
- Hyperbolic limit on the early arrival time of bright pulses from PSR~J08354510 (Vela)
- A multi-wavelength pipeline for pulsar searches