Speaker
Description
Cosmic-ray acceleration up to PeV energies has been suggested to take place in massive and young stellar clusters. The formation of a strong termination shock driven by the collective action of stellar winds in compact clusters offers a promising location where efficient particle acceleration might take place over Million year timescales. Moreover, the impulsive acceleration from supernova remnants (SNRs) occurring in their cores provides a further source of power, soon becoming dominant one. The subsequent hadro-nuclear interactions of these particles result into gamma-ray and neutrino production. Within a scenario of particle acceleration at the cluster wind termination shock and at SNRs, we compute the emerging gamma-ray and neutrino signal from star clusters within the Milky Way. We further evaluate detection prospects of the gamma-ray and neutrino fluxes with the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO), and KM3NeT, by adopting detailed differential sensitivity curves calculated for extended sources.
