The Department of Astronomy 2025-2026 Colloquium Series Presents:
Dr.Shuo Zhang Assistant Professor, Michigan State University
Multi-messenger Hunt for Galactic PeVatrons
Since the discovery of cosmic rays over a century ago, their origin has remained an open question. While the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed that the most extreme cosmic hadron accelerators are likely associated with faraway AGN, cosmic rays with energies up to the "knee" at a few PeV are widely believed to originate from Galactic particle accelerators, often referred to as Galactic PeVatrons. Rapid discoveries and
breakthroughs in ultra-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy and neutrino astronomy since 2023 have led us into a new era where pursuing individual Galactic PeVatorns becomes possible. A series of on-going projects aims to answer the following big questions: What kind of Galactic sources are able to accelerate charged particles into PeV energies? Which types of particles can they accelerate, leptons or hadrons? Where, within
or around a Galactic source, are the particle accelerated? In this talk, I will present our on-going multi-messenger effort to identify Galactic PeVatron candidates, by combining multi-wavelength data with neutrino observations from IceCube. Especially, I will highlight a few recent successful source identifications of PeVatron candidates discovered by the LHAASO observatory.
Since the discovery of cosmic rays over a century ago, their origin has remained an open question. While the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed that the most extreme cosmic hadron accelerators are likely associated with faraway AGN, cosmic rays with energies up to the "knee" at a few PeV are widely believed to originate from Galactic particle accelerators, often referred to as Galactic PeVatrons. Rapid discoveries and
breakthroughs in ultra-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy and neutrino astronomy since 2023 have led us into a new era where pursuing individual Galactic PeVatorns becomes possible. A series of on-going projects aims to answer the following big questions: What kind of Galactic sources are able to accelerate charged particles into PeV energies? Which types of particles can they accelerate, leptons or hadrons? Where, within
or around a Galactic source, are the particle accelerated? In this talk, I will present our on-going multi-messenger effort to identify Galactic PeVatron candidates, by combining multi-wavelength data with neutrino observations from IceCube. Especially, I will highlight a few recent successful source identifications of PeVatron candidates discovered by the LHAASO observatory.
| Building: | West Hall |
|---|---|
| Event Type: | Lecture / Discussion |
| Tags: | Astronomy |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from Department of Astronomy |
