Slide 37 of 48
Notes:
We are going to consider the background emission from ‘Space’ in the Galaxy and determine the relative contribution of various processes, ie the diffuse continuum emission.
There are two dominant processes -
1. thermal bremsstrahlung emission, where electrons are decelerated in the electrostatic fields of ions and atomic nuclei. The electron energies are approximately equal to the photon energies, thus taking a photon energy of 2.5 keV, beta=v/c (where v is the velocity of the electron and c is the speed of light), =0.1.
2. Non-thermal emission, ie synchrotron and inverse Compton emission. In both cases, the processes depend on other properties of the source.
We are going to determine the electron energies required in the non-thermal processes to produce X-rays. Then we will compare the relative contributions of the non-thermal processes to see which one dominates.
