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Post Info TOPIC: Intergalactic magnetic fields


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Title: Determination of intergalactic magnetic fields from gamma ray data
Authors: Warren Essey, Shin'ichiro Ando, Alexander Kusenko

We report a measurement of intergalactic magnetic fields using combined data from Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes and Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, based on the spectral data alone. If blazars are assumed to produce both gamma rays and cosmic rays, the observed spectra are not sensitive to the intrinsic spectrum of the source, because, for a distant blazar, secondary photons produced in line-of-sight cosmic-ray interactions dominate the signal. In this case, we set a robust limit 0.01 fG < B < 30 fG. If one excludes the cosmic-ray component, the robust 0.01 fG lower limit remains, but the upper limit depends on the spectral properties of the source. We present the allowed ranges for a variety of model parameters.

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Universal, primordial magnetic fields discovered in deep space by UCLA, Caltech physicists

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology and UCLA have discovered evidence of "universal ubiquitous magnetic fields" that have permeated deep space between galaxies since the time of the Big Bang.
Caltech physicist Shin'ichiro Ando and Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA, report the discovery in a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters; the research is currently available online.
Ando and Kusenko studied images of the most powerful objects in the universe - supermassive black holes that emit high-energy radiation as they devour stars in distant galaxies - obtained by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

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Title: Evidence for Gamma-Ray Halos Around Active Galactic Nuclei and the First Measurement of Intergalactic Magnetic Fields
Authors: Shin'ichiro Ando (Caltech), Alexander Kusenko (UCLA/Tokyo)
(Version v2)

Intergalactic magnetic fields (IGMF) can cause the appearance of halos around the gamma-ray images of distant objects because an electromagnetic cascade initiated by a high-energy gamma-ray interaction with the photon background is broadened by magnetic deflections. We report evidence of such gamma-ray halos in the stacked images of the 170 brightest active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the 11-month source catalogue of the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Excess over point spread function in the surface brightness profile is statistically significant at 3.5\sigma (99.95% confidence level), for the nearby, hard population of AGN. The halo size and brightness are consistent with IGMF, B_{IGMF} ~ 10^{-15} G. The knowledge of IGMF will facilitate the future gamma-ray and charged-particle astronomy. Furthermore, since IGMF are likely to originate from the primordial seed fields created shortly after the Big Bang, this potentially opens a new window on the origin of cosmological magnetic fields, inflation, and the phase transitions in the early Universe.

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