Journal
ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 753, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/753/1/41
Keywords
cosmic rays; Galaxy: center; gamma rays: galaxies; gamma rays: general; gamma rays: ISM; ISM: abundances
Categories
Funding
- NASA [NNX11AQ10G]
- Department of Energy
- DoE [DE-FG02-04ER41286]
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [757911] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Physics [757911] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- NASA [139196, NNX11AQ10G] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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Recently, detections of a high-energy gamma-ray source at the position of the Galactic center have been reported by multiple gamma-ray telescopes, spanning the energy range between 100 MeV and 100 TeV. Analysis of these signals strongly suggests the TeV emission to have a morphology consistent with a point source up to the angular resolution of the HESS telescope (approximately 3 pc), while the point-source nature of the GeV emission is currently unsettled, with indications that it may be spatially extended. In the case that the emission is hadronic and in a steady state, we show that the expected gamma-ray morphology is dominated by the distribution of target gas, rather than by details of cosmic-ray injection and propagation. Specifically, we expect a significant portion of hadronic emission to coincide with the position of the circumnuclear ring, which resides between 1 and 3 pc from the Galactic center. We note that the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be able to observe conclusive correlations between the morphology of the TeV gamma-ray source and the observed gas density, convincingly confirming or ruling out a hadronic origin for the gamma-ray emission.
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