PoS - Proceedings of Science
Volume 301 - 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017) - Session Gamma-Ray Astronomy. GA-galactic
The Interstellar Radiation Field of the Milky Way in Three Spatial Dimensions
T.A. Porter*, G. Johannesson and I.V. Moskalenko
Full text: pdf
Pre-published on: August 16, 2017
Published on: August 03, 2018
Abstract
The interstellar radiation field (ISRF) of the Milky Way is the result of emission by stars and re-processing of the starlight by dust in the interstellar medium. The ISRF is an essential input to cosmic-ray (CR) propagation codes for calculating the energy losses by leptons from inverse Compton scattering, and the resulting interstellar gamma-ray emission. To date, models for the ISRF have used a 2D Galactocentric cylindrical symmetric approximation, which neglects details of Galactic structure such as spiral arms and the asymmetric stellar bulge. In this contribution, 3D spatial models for the ISRF are presented that incorporate such spatial elements. Because there is no consensus on the geometry of these structures the calculations presented in this contribution employ descriptions for the stellar luminosity and dust distribution taken from the literature and use the Fast Radiation Numerical Kalculation for Interstellar Emission (FRaNKIE) code to generate corresponding spectral intensity distributions throughout the Galaxy. Locally the models fairly successfully reproduce near- to far-infrared data, despite having distinctly different stellar and dust density distributions. Elsewhere in the Galaxy, the 3D intensity distributions reflect the differences due to the input stellar and dust density distributions between the models.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.301.0737
How to cite

Metadata are provided both in "article" format (very similar to INSPIRE) as this helps creating very compact bibliographies which can be beneficial to authors and readers, and in "proceeding" format which is more detailed and complete.

Open Access
Creative Commons LicenseCopyright owned by the author(s) under the term of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.