Constraining the production of cosmic rays by pulsars

Understand

One of the possible sources of hadronic cosmic rays (CRs) are newborn pulsars.

• If this is indeed the case, they should feature diffusive gamma-ray halos produced by interactions of CRs with interstellar gas.
• In this paper we try to identify extended gamma-ray emission around young pulsars, making use of the 7-year Fermi-LAT data.
• For this purpose we select and analyze a set of eight pulsars that are most likely to possess detectable gamma-ray halos.