Search results for " Gamma Astronomy"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
Observation of the cosmic ray moon shadowing effect with the ARGO-YBJ experiment
2011
Cosmic rays are hampered by the Moon and a deficit in its direction is expected (the so-called Moon shadow). The Moon shadow is an important tool to determine the performance of an air shower array. Indeed, the westward displacement of the shadow center, due to the bending effect of the geomagnetic field on the propagation of cosmic rays, allows the setting of the absolute rigidity scale of the primary particles inducing the showers recorded by the detector. In addition, the shape of the shadow permits to determine the detector point spread function, while the position of the deficit at high energies allows the evaluation of its absolute pointing accuracy. In this paper we present the obser…
Ultrahigh energy neutrinos in the Mediterranean: Detecting ντ and νμ with a km3 telescope
2007
23 pages, 13 figures.-- PACS nrs.: 95.85.Ry, 95.55.Vj, 13.15.+g.-- ISI Article Identifier: 000245928000025.-- ArXiv pre-print available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609241
Black hole lightning due to particle acceleration at subhorizon scales
2015
Supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions of solar masses are commonly found in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers seek to image jet formation using radio interferometry, but still suffer from insufficient angular resolution. An alternative method to resolve small structures is to measure the time variability of their emission. Here, we report on gamma-ray observations of the radio galaxy IC 310 obtained with the MAGIC telescopes revealing variability with doubling time scales faster than 4.8 min. Causality constrains the size of the emission region to be smaller than 20\% of the gravitational radius of its central black hole. We suggest that the emission is associated …
Proton-air cross section measurement with the ARGO-YBJ cosmic ray experiment
2009
The proton-air cross section in the energy range 1-100 TeV has been measured by the ARGO-YBJ cosmic ray experiment. The analysis is based on the flux attenuation for different atmospheric depths (i.e. zenith angles) and exploits the detector capabilities of selecting the shower development stage by means of hit multiplicity, density and lateral profile measurements at ground. The effects of shower fluctuations, the contribution of heavier primaries and the uncertainties of the hadronic interaction models, have been taken into account. The results have been used to estimate the total proton-proton cross section at center of mass energies between 70 and 500 GeV, where no accelerator data are …