Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2015
Volume 60, Number 4
Saturday–Tuesday, April 11–14, 2015; Baltimore, Maryland
Session C9: Invited Session: High-Energy Transients in the Universe |
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Sponsoring Units: DAP Chair: Julie McEnery, NASA Room: Key 5 |
Saturday, April 11, 2015 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
C9.00001: Probing Neutron Star Physics with Quasi-Periodic Oscillations in Magnetar Bursts Invited Speaker: Daniela Huppenkothen Neutron stars, the remnants of massive stellar explosions, are prime candidates for studying dense matter physics in conditions not accessible in the laboratory. Among the zoo of neutron star phenomena, magnetars, neutron stars with an extremely high magnetic field, are of particular interest for their spectacular bursting behaviour in X-rays and gamma-rays. They show thousands of recurrent short, bright bursts as well as some of the brightest gamma-ray events, called giant flares, ever observed on earth. The detection of quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in giant flares and, more recently, in small recurrent bursts, is generally interpreted as the observable signature of global oscillations of the neutron star following a star quake. This detection has opened up the potential of neutron star seismology: probing the physical conditions in the interior of the star via the information conveyed in star quakes. In this talk, I will give an overview of observational studies of these sources, focusing on recent detections of QPOs in smaller bursts as well as results from the giant flares. I will then tie these observational results to theoretical models of the star quakes that tie observations to the neutron star interior and crust, and I will finish with an outlook of the future of magnetar seismology. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 11, 2015 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
C9.00002: Very rapid VHE flares from the radio galaxy IC310 Invited Speaker: Karl Mannheim The galaxy IC310 in the Perseus cluster exhibits multi-TeV gamma-ray emission highly variable on time scales of minutes to years. An origin of the gamma rays from shocks in its one-sided radio jet can be ruled out. The emission region must be located very close to the supermassive black hole in the center of IC310. During the large-amplitude flux variations, the spectral shape remained invariant, consistent with particle injection far above 10 TeV followed by electromagnetic cascading, loading the jet with secondary electrons and positrons. Due to photo-meson production, high-energy neutrino emission is also expected. The observations are in line with models assuming proton acceleration by an electric field across a vacuum gap in the magnetosphere of a rapidly rotating black hole. Such transient, hard-spectrum spectral components may be common to all gamma-ray emitting AGN with low accretion rates and Poynting-flux dominated jets in which the thermal pair production rate does not suffice to provide the Goldreich-Julian charge density. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 11, 2015 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
C9.00003: Fast Radio Bursts Invited Speaker: Laura Spitler Fast radio bursts are a new population of bright, short-duration bursts detected by radio telescopes at 1.4 GHz. Their observational properties suggest that fast radio bursts originate from extragalactic sources and possibly even from cosmologically significant distances. The astrophysical origin of these bursts is still highly uncertain. And although we believe that roughly 10,000 fast radio bursts occur each day over the entire sky, fewer than twenty have been detected. I will give an overview of the observational properties of fast radio bursts and describe the work being done to expand our understanding of the phenomenon. [Preview Abstract] |
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