Al-26 studies with INTEGRAL's spectrometer SPI
May, 20046 pages
Published in:
- ESA Spec.Publ. 552 (2004) 27
Contribution to:
e-Print:
- astro-ph/0405192 [astro-ph]
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Abstract: (arXiv)
Al(26) radioactivity traces recent nucleosynthesis throughout the Galaxy, and is known to be produced in massive stars and novae. The map from its decay gamma-ray line suggests massive stars to dominate, but high-resolution line spectroscopy is expected to supplement imaging of Al(26) source regions and thus to help decide about the Al(26) injection process and interstellar environment, hence about the specific massive-star subgroup and phase which produces interstellar Al(26). The INTEGRAL Spectrometer SPI has observed Galactic Al(26) radioactivity in its 1809 keV gamma-ray line during its first inner-Galaxy survey. Instrumental background lines make analysis difficult: yet, a clear signal from the inner Galaxy agrees with expectations. In particular, SPI has constrained the line width to exclude previously-reported line broadenings corresponding to velocities >500 km/s. The signal-to-background ratio of percent implies that detector response and background modeling need to be fine-tuned to eventually enable line shape deconvolution in order to extract source location information along the line of sight.- NUCLEOSYNTHESIS
- SUPERNOVAE
- MASSIVE STARS
- GAMMA-RAY TELESCOPES
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