Mirages and Large TeV Halo-Pulsar Offsets from Cosmic Ray Propagation

Abstract

The study of extended $\gamma$-ray sources usually assumes symmetric diffusion of cosmic rays. However, recent observations of multiple sources near single pulsars and significant offsets between TeV halo centroids and their parent pulsars suggest that this assumption is overly simplistic. In this Letter, we demonstrate that asymmetric propagation of cosmic rays near their accelerators may create multiple TeV sources instead of a single symmetric source. This mechanism also explains the large offsets between TeV halo centroids and their pulsars. We demonstrate that several perplexing detected sources can be naturally explained without invoking additional invisible accelerators.

arXiv commentaccepted by PRL

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• PHECT: A lightweight computation tool for pulsar halo emission
• Mirage Sources and Large TeV Halo-Pulsar Offsets: Exploring the Parameter Space
• Anisotropic Diffusion in Pulsar Halos: Interpreting the asymmetric morphology of Geminga and Monogem halos measured by HAWC