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Particle acceleration in interstellar shocks

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Abstract

This review presents the fundamentals of the particle acceleration processes active in interstellar medium (ISM), which are essentially based on the so-called Fermi mechanism theory. More specifically, the review presents here in more details the first order Fermi acceleration process—also known as diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) mechanism. In this case, acceleration is induced by the interstellar (IS) shock waves. These IS shocks are mainly associated with emission nebulae (H ii regions, planetary nebulae and supernova remnants). Among all types of emission nebulae, the strongest shocks are associated with supernova remnants (SNRs). Due to this fact they also provide the most efficient manner to accelerate ISM particles to become high energy particles, i.e. cosmic-rays (CRs). The review therefore focuses on the particle acceleration at the strong shock waves of supernova remnants.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referee for useful comments and suggestions that greatly improved the quality of this paper. We acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia through the project No. 176005 “Emission Nebulae: Structure and Evolution”. The authors thank Dragana Momic for careful reading and correction of the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Astronomy, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade, Studentski trg 16, 11000, Belgrade, Serbia

    Dejan Urošević, Bojan Arbutina & Dušan Onić

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  1. Dejan Urošević
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  2. Bojan Arbutina
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Correspondence to Dejan Urošević.

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This article belongs to the Topical Collection: Plasma, Particles, and Photons: ISM Physics Revisited. Guest Editors: Manami Sasaki, Ralf-Jürgen Dettmar, Julia Tjus.

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Urošević, D., Arbutina, B. & Onić, D. Particle acceleration in interstellar shocks. Astrophys Space Sci 364, 185 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10509-019-3669-y

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