The Accretion Wind Model of the Fermi Bubbles (II): Radiation

TL;DR

This paper models gamma-ray emission from the Fermi bubbles by simulating cosmic ray interactions in winds from Sgr A*, explaining observed features and suggesting winds as a formation mechanism.

Contribution

It extends previous work by calculating gamma-ray radiation from the Fermi bubbles using MHD simulations of cosmic ray distribution and interactions.

Findings

Gamma-ray spectrum explained by pion decay and inverse Compton scattering.

Uniform surface brightness and boundary width are reproduced.

Winds from accretion flows can form large-scale bubbles in galaxies.

Abstract

In a previous work, we have shown that the formation of the Fermi bubbles can be due to the interaction between winds launched from the hot accretion flow in Sgr A* and the interstellar medium (ISM). In that work, we focus only on the morphology. In this paper we continue our study by calculating the gamma-ray radiation. Some cosmic ray protons (CRp) and electrons must be contained in the winds, which are likely formed by physical processes such as magnetic reconnection. We have performed MHD simulations to study the spatial distribution of CRp, considering the advection and diffusion of CRp in the presence of magnetic field. We find that a permeated zone is formed just outside of the contact discontinuity between winds and ISM, where the collisions between CRp and thermal nuclei mainly occur. The decay of neutral pions generated in the collisions, combined with the inverse Compton scattering of background soft photons by the secondary leptons generated in the collisions and primary CR electrons can well explain the observed gamma-ray spectral energy distribution. Other features such as the uniform surface brightness along the latitude and the boundary width of the bubbles are also explained. The advantage of this accretion wind model is that the adopted wind properties come from the detailed small scale MHD numerical simulation of accretion flows and the value of mass accretion rate has independent observational evidences. The success of the model suggests that we may seriously consider the possibility that cavities and bubbles observed in other contexts such as galaxy clusters may be formed by winds rather than jets.