Henrike Fleischhack: Mysterious PeVatrons: where are our Galaxy's most powerful accelerators hiding?

Friday 16 Dec 2022, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

SR5 (Villa)

For more than a hundred years, we have known about cosmic rays, energetic charged particles impinging upon the Earth’s atmosphere from all directions. We have learned much about these particles and the cosmic accelerators that produce them, but many mysteries remain. In this talk, I will explain how we use gamma-ray detectors and other instruments to search for and study PeVatrons, the sources of the most energetic cosmic rays in our Milky Way. I will present the case of supernova remnant G106.3+2.7, recently identified as a source of energetic protons, as an example of how such sources can be identified. I will show the challenges we had to overcome and outline how future detectors can help understand cosmic accelerators even better.

PeVatrons_DESY_share.pdf