Cosmic Gamma-Ray Sources

Gamma-ray astronomy has undergone an enormous progress in the last 15 years. The success of satellite experiments like NASA's Comp­ ton Gamma-Ray Observatory and ESA's INTEGRAL mission, as well as of ground-based instruments have open new views into the high-energy Universe. Different classes of cosmic gamma-ray sources have been now detected at different energies, in addition to young radio pulsars and gamma-ray bursts, the classical ones. The new sources include radio­ quiet pulsars, microquasars, supernova remnants, starburst galaxies, ra­ dio galaxies, flat-spectrum radio quasars, and BL Lacertae objects. A large number of unidentified sources strongly suggests that this brief enumeration is far from complete. Gamma-ray bursts are now estab­ lished as extragalactic sources with tremendous energy output. There is accumulating evidence supporting the idea that massive stars and star forming regions can accelerate charged particles up to relativistic ener­ gies making them gamma-ray sources. Gamma-ray astronomy has also proved to be a powerful tool for cosmology imposing constraints to the background photon fields that can absorb the gamma-ray flux from dis­ tant sources. All this has profound implications for our current ideas about how particles are accelerated and transported in both the local and distant U niverse. The evolution of our knowledge on the gamma-ray sky has been so fast that is not easy for the non-specialist scientist and the graduate student to be aware of the full potential of this field or to grasp the fundamentals of a given topic in order to attempt some original contribution.

Inhalt

Preface.- Chapter 1. Introduction K.S. Cheng, Gustavo E. Romero.- Chapter 2. Fundamentals of gamma-ray astrophysics Gustavo E. Romero, K.S. Cheng.- Chapter 3. Galactic gamma-ray sources Isabelle A. Grenier.- Chapter 4. Extragalactic gamma-ray sources D.F. Torres.- Chapter 5. Non-thermal emission from early-type binaries G. Rauw.- Chapter 6. Gamma-ray emission from supernova remnants Gustavo E. Romero.- Chapter 7. Gamma-ray pulsars D.J. Thompson.- Chapter 8. Theories of gamma-ray emission from pulsars K.S. Cheng.- Chapter 9. High-energy emission from microquasars R. Fender, T. Maccarone.- Chapter 10. Gamma-ray bursts T.Lu, Y.F. Huang, Z.G. Dai, D.M. Wei.- Chapter 11. Clusters of galaxies at high-energy gamma-rays Olaf Reimer.- Chapter 12. Diffuse gamma-rays Igor V. Moskalenko, Andrew W. Strong, Olaf Reimer.- Chapter 13. Multifrequency strategies for the identification of gamma-ray sources Reshmi Mukherjee, Jules Halpern.- Chapter 14. Future ground-based TeV gamma-ray telescopes T.C. Weekes.- Chapter 15. GLAST: Understanding the high-energy gamma-ray sky Julie E. McEnery, Igor V. Moskalenko, Jonathan F. Ormes.- Author Index.- Object Index