Positrons and 511 keV radiation as tracers of recent binary neutron star mergers

Alexander Kusenko; David Radice; George M. Fuller; Volodymyr Takhistov

Positrons and 511 keV radiation as tracers of recent binary neutron star mergers

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arxiv 1811.00133 v3 pith:IHMYC22R submitted 2018-10-31 astro-ph.HE

George M. Fuller , Alexander Kusenko , David Radice , Volodymyr Takhistov This is my paper

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keywords mergerspositronsneutronns-nsrecentbinaryemissionns-bh

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Neutron-rich material ejected from neutron star-neutron star (NS-NS) and neutron star-black hole (NS-BH) binary mergers is heated by nuclear processes to temperatures of a few hundred keV, resulting in a population of electron-positron pairs. Some of the positrons escape from the outer layers of the ejecta. We show that the population of low-energy positrons produced by NS-NS and NS-BH mergers in the Milky Way can account for the observed 511-keV line from the Galactic center (GC). Moreover, we suggest how positrons and the associated 511-keV emission can be used as tracers of recent mergers. Recent discovery of 511 keV emission from the ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Reticulum II, consistent with a rare NS-NS merger event, provides a smoking-gun signature of our proposal.

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Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

Relaxation of Energy Constraints for Positrons Generating the Galactic Annihilation Signal
astro-ph.HE 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

A full forward model of INTEGRAL, COMPTEL, and EGRET data relaxes the upper limit on positron injection energy for the Galactic 511 keV signal from a few MeV to roughly 40-60 MeV.

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