Colliding-Wind Binaries as a Source of TeV Cosmic Rays
arXiv:2104.13821 · doi:10.3389/fspas.2021.667805
Abstract
In addition to gamma-ray binaries which contain a compact object, high-energy and very high-energy gamma rays have also been detected from colliding-wind binaries. The collision of the winds produces two strong shock fronts, one for each wind, both surrounding a shock region of compressed and heated plasma, where particles are accelerated to very high energies. Magnetic field is also amplified in the shocked region on which the acceleration of particles greatly depends. In this work, we performed full three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of colliding winds coupled to a code that evolves the kinematics of passive charged test particles subject to the plasma fluctuations. After the run of a large ensemble of test particles with initial thermal distributions, we show that such shocks produce a nonthermal population (nearly 1% of total particles) of few tens of GeVs up to few TeVs, depending on the initial magnetization level of the stellar winds. We were able to determine the loci of fastest acceleration, in the range of MeV/s to GeV/s, to be related to the turbulent plasma with amplified magnetic field of the shock. These results show that colliding-wind binaries are indeed able to produce a significant population of high-energy particles, in relatively short timescales, compared to the dynamical and diffusion timescales.
arXiv comment16 pages, 7 figures
References in corpus (22)
- Energy spectra of gamma-rays, electrons and neutrinos produced at proton-proton interactions in the very high energy regime
- The Milky Way in X-rays for an outside observer: Log(N)-Log(S) and Luminosity Function of X-ray binaries from RXTE/ASM data
- The interplay of magnetically-dominated turbulence and magnetic reconnection in producing nonthermal particles
- Catalogue of particle-accelerating colliding-wind binaries
- Non-thermal high-energy emission from colliding winds of massive stars
- Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Reconnection and Particle Acceleration: Three-Dimensional Effects
- Particle Acceleration in Turbulence and Weakly Stochastic Reconnection
- Particle acceleration in the driven relativistic reconnection
- Radio emission models of Colliding-Wind Binary Systems
- A Simple and Accurate Riemann Solver for Isothermal MHD
- Properties of the First-order Fermi acceleration in fast magnetic reconnection driven by turbulence in collisional MHD flows
- Radio emission from the massive stars in the Galactic Super Star Cluster Westerlund 1
- Search for gamma-ray emission from magnetars with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
- MHD numerical simulations of colliding winds in massive binary systems - I. Thermal vs non-thermal radio emission
- Simulating three-dimensional nonthermal high-energy photon emission in colliding-wind binaries
- Overview of non-transient gamma-ray binaries and prospects for the Cherenkov Telescope Array
- Detection of very-high-energy γ-ray emission from the colliding wind binary η Car with H.E.S.S
- High-energy particle transport in 3D hydrodynamic models of colliding-wind binaries
- A model for the non-thermal emission of the very massive colliding-wind binary HD 93129A
- Particle Acceleration by Magnetic Reconnection
- Colliding-wind binary systems: Diffusive shock acceleration and non-thermal emission
- Colliding-wind Binaries with strong magnetic fields