Gamma-rays from millisecond pulsars in Globular Clusters

Abstract

Globular clusters (GCs) with their ages of the order of several billion years contain many final products of evolution of stars such as: neutron stars, white dwarfs and probably also black holes. These compact objects can be at present responsible for the acceleration of particles to relativistic energies. Therefore, gamma-ray emission is expected from GCs as a result of radiation processes occurring either in the inner magnetosperes of millisecond pulsars or in the vicinity of accreting neutron stars and white dwarfs or as a result of interaction of particles leaving the compact objects with the strong radiation field within the GC. Recently, GeV gamma-ray emission has been detected from several GCs by the new satellite observatory Fermi. Also Cherenkov telescopes reported interesting upper limits at the TeV energies which start to constrain the content of GCs. We review the results of these gamma-ray observations in the context of recent scenarios for their origin.

20 pages, 9 figures, will be published in Astrophysics and Space Science Series (Springer), eds. N. Rea and D.F. Torres

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• Fermi Large Area Telescope Observations of the Crab Pulsar and Nebula
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Gamma-ray emission from globular clusters
• Deep observations of the globular cluster M15 with the MAGIC telescopes
• Identifying the brightest Galactic globular clusters for future observations by H.E.S.S. and CTA
• Probing the pulsar population of Terzan 5 via spectral modeling
• Glow-in-the-dark globular clusters: modelling their multiwavelength lanterns