Fermi Large Area Telescope Observations of the Cosmic-Ray Induced gamma-ray Emission of the Earth's Atmosphere
Dec, 200913 pages
Published in:
- Phys.Rev.D 80 (2009) 122004
e-Print:
- 0912.1868 [astro-ph.HE]
Report number:
- SLAC-PUB-14880
Experiments:
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Abstract: (arXiv)
We report on measurements of the cosmic-ray induced gamma-ray emission of Earth's atmosphere by the Large Area Telescope onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The LAT has observed the Earth during its commissioning phase and with a dedicated Earth-limb following observation in September 2008. These measurements yielded 6.4 x 10^6 photons with energies >100MeV and ~250hours total livetime for the highest quality data selection. This allows the study of the spatial and spectral distributions of these photons with unprecedented detail. The spectrum of the emission - often referred to as Earth albedo gamma-ray emission - has a power-law shape up to 500 GeV with spectral index Gamma = 2.79+-0.06.Note:
- Accepted for publication in PRD
- 96.50.sd
- 96.50.S-
- 92.60.hx
- 96.50.sf
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