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Ultra-High-Energy Gamma-Ray Bubble around Microquasar V4641 Sgr

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arxiv 2410.16117 v1 pith:QHEIJRYH submitted 2024-10-21 astro-ph.HE

classification astro-ph.HE
keywords accelerationblackenergygamma-raymicroquasarsrayselectronsgamma-rays
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Microquasars are laboratories for the study of jets of relativistic particles produced by accretion onto a spinning black hole. Microquasars are near enough to allow detailed imaging of spatial features across the multiwavelength spectrum. The recent extension of the spatial morphology of a microquasar, SS 433, to TeV gamma rays \cite{abeysekara2018very} localizes the acceleration of electrons at shocks in the jet far from the black hole \cite{hess2024ss433}. Here we report TeV gamma-ray emission from another microquasar, V4641~Sgr, which reveals particle acceleration at similar distances from the black hole as SS~433. Additionally, the gamma-ray spectrum of V4641 is among the hardest TeV spectra observed from any known gamma-ray source and is detected up to 200 TeV. Gamma rays are produced by particles, either electrons or hadrons, of higher energies. Because electrons lose energy more quickly the higher their energy, such a spectrum either very strongly constrains the electron production mechanism or points to the acceleration of high-energy hadrons. This observation suggests that large-scale jets from microquasars could be more common than previously expected and that microquasars could be a significant source of Galactic cosmic rays. high energy gamma-rays also provide unique constraints on the acceleration mechanisms of extra-Galactic cosmic rays postulated to be produced by the supermassive black holes and relativistic jets of quasars. The distance to quasars limits imaging studies due to insufficient angular resolution of gamma-rays and due to attenuation of the highest energy gamma-rays by the extragalactic background light.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

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

  1. Why do massive stars form bow shocks? Bulk ISM motion as the main driver of bow shock formation and geometry

    astro-ph.SR 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Bulk interstellar gas motion, not stellar motion, dominates most massive star bow shocks; only about 21% are classical aligned bow shocks.

  2. Implication of multiple source populations of Galactic cosmic rays from proton and helium spectra

    astro-ph.HE 2025-11 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    The proton and helium spectra from 1 GeV to 10 PeV can be reproduced only by adding two local sources or a second background population on top of the standard cosmic-ray background.

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