A pilot search for MeV gamma-ray emission from five galaxy clusters using archival COMPTEL data

Abstract

We search for MeV gamma-ray emission between 0.75-30 MeV from five galaxy clusters, viz. Coma, VIRGO, SPT-CL J2012-5649, Bullet, and El Gordo, using archival data from the COMPTEL telescope. For this purpose we use three search templates: point source, radial disk and radial Gaussian. We do not detect any signals from Coma, SPT-CL J2012-5649, Bullet and El Gordo clusters with the 95\% c.l. photon energy flux limit $\sim 10^{-10}erg/c{\mathrm{m}}^2/s$. For VIRGO, we detect a non-zero signal between 0.92 to 1.63 MeV having marginal significance of about $2.5\sigma$, with the observed energy flux $\sim 10^{-9}ergs/c{\mathrm{m}}^2/s$. However, we do not confirm the previously reported evidence in literature for a gamma-ray line from Coma and VIRGO clusters between 5-7 MeV.

9 pages, 7 figures. Accepted for publication in JCAP

References in corpus (15)

• A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter
• Galaxy Clusters Discovered via the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect in the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ survey
• NuSTAR Observations of the Bullet Cluster: Constraints on Inverse Compton Emission
• The Blanco Cosmology Survey: Data Acquisition, Processing, Calibration, Quality Diagnostics and Data Release
• Redshifts, Sample Purity, and BCG Positions for the Galaxy Cluster Catalog from the first 720 Square Degrees of the South Pole Telescope Survey
• GammaLib and ctools: A software framework for the analysis of astronomical gamma-ray data
• PANGU: A High Resolution Gamma-ray Space Telescope
• Massive Argon Space Telescope (MAST): a concept of heavy time projection chamber for gamma-ray astronomy in the 100 MeV --- 1 TeV energy range
• Constraints on neutrino masses from the study of the nearby large-scale structure and galaxy cluster counts
• The El Gordo galaxy cluster challenges ΛCDM for any plausible collision velocity
• COSI: From Calibrations and Observations to All-sky Images
• The GAMMA-400 space observatory: status and perspectives
• COMPTEL data analysis using GammaLib and ctools
• Snowmass 2021 Letter of Interest: The GRAMS Project: MeV Gamma-Ray Observations and Antimatter-Based Dark Matter Searches
• All-Sky-ASTROGAM: The MeV Gamma-Ray Companion to Multimessenger Astronomy

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Search for GeV gamma-ray emission from SPT-CL J2012-5649 with six years of DAMPE data