No abstract

Galactic magnetic field (GMF) and secondary cosmic rays (CRs) (e.g. 10 beryllium, boron, antiproton) are important components to understand the propagation of CRs in the Milky Way Galaxy. Realistic modeling of GMF is based on the Faraday rotation measurements of various Galactic and extragalactic radio sources and synchrotron emission from CR leptons in the radio frequency range, thereby providing information of halo height. On the other hand, diffusion coefficient and halo height are also estimated from the 10 Be/ 9 Be and B/C ratios. Moreover, density distribution of gaseous components of interstellar medium (ISM) also plays an important role as secondary CRs are produced due to interaction of primary CRs with the gaseous components of ISM. We consider mainly molecular, atomic, and ionized components of hydrogen gas for our study. Recent observations and hydrodynamical simulations provide new forms of density profiles of hydrogen gas in Milky Way Galaxy. In the DRAGON code, we have implemented our chosen density profiles, based on realistic observations in radio, X-ray and γ-ray wavebands, and hydrodynamical simulations of interstellar hydrogen gas to study the variation in the height of the halo required to fit the observed CR spectra. Our results show the halo height (zt) varies in the range of 2 to 6 kpc for the density profiles considered in our work.

Low energy cosmic rays are the major ionization agents of molecular clouds. However, it has been shown that, if the cosmic ray spectrum measured by Voyager 1 is representative of the whole Galaxy, the predicted ionization rate in diffuse clouds fails to reproduce data by 1−2 orders of magnitude, implying that an additional source of ionization must exist. One of the solutions proposed to explain this discrepancy is based on the existence of an unknown low energy (in the range 1 keV-1 MeV, not probed by Voyager) cosmic ray component, called carrot when first hypothesized by Reeves and collaborators in the seventies. Here we investigate the energetic required by such scenario. We show that the power needed to maintain such low energy component is comparable of even larger than that needed to explain the entire observed cosmic ray spectrum. Moreover, if the interstellar turbulent magnetic field has to sustain a carrot, through second-order Fermi acceleration, the required turbulence level would be definitely too large compared to the one expected at the scale resonant with such low energy particles. Our study basically rules out all the plausible sources of a cosmic ray carrot, thus making such hidden component unlikely to be an appealing and viable source of ionization in molecular clouds.

Determination of baryon number (or mass) distribution of the strangelets, that may fragment out of the warm and excited strange quark matter ejected in the merger of strange stars in compact binary stellar systems in the Galaxy, is attempted here by using a statistical disassembly model. Finite mass of strange quarks is taken into account in the analysis. Resulting charges of the strangelets and the corresponding Coulomb corrections are included to get a plausible size distribution of those strangelets as they are produced in binary stellar mergers thus getting injected in the Galaxy. From this mass distribution of strangelets at their source, an approximate order of magnitude estimate for their possible flux in solar neighborhood is attempted by using a simple diffusion model for their propagation in the Galaxy. Such theoretical estimate is important in view of the ongoing efforts to detect galactic strangelets by recent satellite-borne experiments.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Tucana-II (Tuc-II), a recently discovered and confirmed Ultra Faint Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy, has a high mass to light ratio as well as a large line-of-sight stellar velocity dispersion, thus making it an ideal candidate for an indirect dark matter (DM) search. In this paper, we have analyzed nine years of γ-ray data obtained from the Fermi-LAT instrument from the direction of Tuc-II. The fact that a very weak significant γ-ray excess (2.2σ) over the background of Tuc-II have been detected from the location of this galaxy. We have observed that this excess of γ-ray emission from the of location Tuc-II rises with longer periods of data. If WIMP pair annihilation is assumed for this faint emission, for bb annihilation channel the test statistics (TS) value peaks at DM mass ∼ 14 GeV and for τ + τ − annihilation channel it peaks at DM mass 4 GeV. It is then called for an estimation of the 95% confidence level upper limit of the possible velocity weighted self-annihilation cross-section of the DM particles (WIMPs) within Tuc-II by fitting the observed γ-ray flux with spectra expected for DM annihilation. The estimated upper limits of the cross-sections from Tuc-II are then compared with two other dwarf galaxies that are considered to be good DM candidates in several studies. We have also compared our results with the cross-sections obtained in various popular theoretical models of the WIMPs to find that our results impose reasonable tight constraints on the parameter spaces of those DM models. In the concluding section, we compared our results with the similar results obtained from a combined dSph analysis by the Fermi-LAT collaboration as well as the results obtained from the studies of DM in the dwarf galaxies by the major ground-based Cherenkov experiments.