Speaker
Description
Massive Star Clusters (SCs) have been proposed as additional contributors to Galactic Cosmic rays (CRs), to overcome the limitations of supernova remnants (SNRs) to reach the highest energy end of the CR spectrum. Thanks to fast mass losses due to the collective stellar winds, the environment around SCs is potentially suitable for particle acceleration up to PeV energies, and their energetics is enough to account for a large fraction of the Galactic CRs. Anyhow, the theoretical models need to be corroborated by clear observations. Despite the increasing number of detections at different energies, the contamination of other sources often makes it difficult to constrain the contribution arising from stellar winds only, unless one selects objects younger than a few Myr, namely before stars start to explode inside clusters.
I will review the results obtained with Fermi-LAT data towards a few massive young star clusters and discuss what implications these result have, especially concerning their contribution to the bulk of Galactic CRs.
