Absorption of High Energy Gamma Rays by Interactions with Extragalactic Starlight Photons a.pdf

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 9 7 0 8 1 8 2 v 1 2 0 A u g 1 9 9 7 Absorption of High Energy Gamma Rays by Interactions with Extragalactic Starlight Photons at High Redshifts M.H. Salamon? and F.W. Stecker? ?Physics Department, University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112 ?Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD 02271 Abstract. We extend earlier calculations of the attenuation suffered by γ-rays during their propagation from extragalactic sources, obtaining new extinction curves for γ-rays down to 10 GeV in energy, from sources up to a redshift of z = 3. The recognition that high energy γ-rays, propagating over cosmological distances, suffer electron-pair-producing interactions with photons from the extragalactic background radiation fields dates back to the 1960s [1–4]. The reaction γγ → e+e? between a γ-ray of energy E and a background photon of energy ? can occur when the center-of-mass square energy s is above threshold, s = 2E?(1? cos θ) 4m2ec 4, where θ is the angle between the two photons’ direction vectors. A γ-ray of energy ETeV TeV therefore interacts only with background photons above a threshold en- ergy ?thr ≈ 0.3eV/ETeV. Since the number density of background photons decreases roughly as a power law in energy, most of the collisions occur near threshold. Thus, when estimating the extinction of 1 TeV gamma rays, it is the density of the in- frared background which dominates; at 20 GeV, however, only UV photons near the Lyman limit can act as targets. This mechanism was recently invoked [5] to explain why many EGRET blazars are not seen at ～TeV energies by ground-based instruments such as Whipple, in spite of the fact that an extrapolation of the EGRET power-law spectra places them above the sensitivity limit of these ground-based detectors. The opacity τ seen by a γ-ray in its propagation from source to Earth is roughly τ ～ NσTd, where N is the number of target soft photons above threshold, σT is the Th