Potential PeVatron supernova remnant G106.3+2.7 seen in the highest-energy gamma rays

Abstract

Cosmic rays (protons and other atomic nuclei) are believed to gain energies of petaelectronvolts (PeV) and beyond at astrophysical particle accelerators called 'PeVatrons' inside our Galaxy. Although a characteristic feature of a PeVatron is expected to be a hard gamma-ray energy spectrum that extends beyond 100 teraelectronvolts (TeV) without a cutoff, none of the currently known sources exhibits such a spectrum due to the low maximum energy of accelerated cosmic rays or insufficient detector sensitivity around 100 TeV. Here we report the observation of gamma-ray emission from the supernova remnant G106.3+2.7 above 10 TeV. This work provides flux data points up to and above 100 TeV and indicates that the very-high-energy gamma-ray emission above 10 TeV is well correlated with a molecular cloud rather than the pulsar PSR J2229+6114. Regarding the gamma-ray emission mechanism of G106.3+2.7, this morphological feature appears to favor a hadronic origin via the π0 decay caused by accelerated relativistic protons over a leptonic one via the inverse-Compton scattering by relativistic electrons. Furthermore, we point out that an X-ray flux upper limit on the synchrotron spectrum would provide important information to firmly establish the hadronic scenario as the mechanism of particle acceleration at the source.

Published in Nature Astronomy

References in corpus (5)

• Fermi Large Area Telescope Bright Gamma-ray Source List
• TeV Gamma-Ray Sources from a Survey of the Galactic Plane with Milagro
• Milagro Observations of Multi-TeV Emission from Galactic Sources in the Fermi Bright Source List
• HAWC J2227+610 and its association with G106.3+2.7, a new potential Galactic PeVatron
• Gamma-Ray Emission from PWNe Interacting with Molecular Clouds

Cited by in corpus (48)

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• Detectability of southern gamma-ray sources beyond 100 TeV with ALPAQUITA, the prototype experiment of ALPACA
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• The Cosmic-ray Knee as a Local Signature of Nearby PeVatrons
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