Speaker
Description
Cosmic ray acceleration up to PeV energies has been suggested to take place in massive and young stellar clusters. The formation of a strong termination shock driven by the collective action of stellar winds in a compact cluster offers a promising location where efficient particle acceleration might take place. The subsequent interactions of these particles with target gas result into hadronic gamma-ray and neutrino production: in particular, if dense clouds are located within and around clusters, enhanced emission is expected. Within a scenario of particle acceleration at the cluster wind termination shock, we compute the emerging multi-messenger signals from local star clusters observed by Gaia, as well as from the nearby illuminated molecular clouds reported in Miville-Deschenes catalog. We further evaluate detection prospects of these signals.
