by Felix A Aharonian, World Scientific. Hardback ISBN 9810245734, £65 ($107).
Astronomy – the study of all kinds of cosmic radiation – meets particle physics at the highest gamma-ray energies. This book offers the opportunity for particle physicists to cross the bridge between the two disciplines. They will discover the nature and properties of the extreme sources in the universe able to emit photons at energies higher than 10 GeV.
Very-high-energy astrophysics is entering a new era with the recent achievement by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) of the first spatially resolved high-energy gamma-ray image of an astronomical object, the supernova remnant RX J1713.7-3946. This image confirms that supernova remnants are at the origin of cosmic rays.
The lead author of the paper in Nature that described the HESS results was Felix Aharonian, the author of this book. Here he uses his expertise to provide a broad and comprehensive overview of the study of cosmic gamma rays, from energies of about 10 GeV to 10 TeV. In nearly 500 pages, he covers all aspects of the field including the theoretical ground of gamma-ray emission and absorption mechanisms, as well as the status of detection facilities. The main part of the book is, however, devoted to the phenomenology of the various sources of very-high-energy gamma rays.
With more figures than equations, the author guides us through the world of supernova remnants, pulsars, jets of quasars and microquasars, and clusters of galaxies. He even discusses the implications for cosmology, as derived from the interaction of very-high-energy gamma rays with the diffuse extragalactic background radiation. As complete as this book tends to be, however, I am a little surprised to find notable omissions, including gamma-ray bursts and the possible annihilation-radiation of weakly interacting massive particules (WIMPs), which are mentioned but not discussed.
Nevertheless, this book with its extensive list of references is a very valuable introduction to the astrophysics of high-energy gamma-ray radiation. Well structured and with its more mathematical parts left for the appendix, it is also suitable for a quick search for a specific topic. It can therefore be used as a reference book for this fascinating “last electromagnetic window” on the cosmos, a topic destined to evolve very rapidly in the coming years.
