Multiwavelength Correlations and Spectral Aspects of Unidentified High Energy Gamma-Ray Sources

Reshmi Mukherjee
Barnard College, Columbia University

More than half the sources in the Third EGRET (3EG) catalog are unidentified, and have no firmly established counterparts at other wavelengths. Some of the EGRET unidentified sources have remained a mystery since the first surveys of the gamma-ray sky with the COS-B satellite. The unidentified sources generally have large error circles, and finding counterparts has often been a challenging job. A multiwavelength approach, using X-ray, optical, and radio data, is often needed to understand the nature of these sources. This technique has been used recently to find likely identifications for several EGRET sources, such as3EG J1835+5918 (Mirabal et al. 2000), 3EG J2227+6122 (Halpern et al. 2000), and in the COS-B field 2CG 075+00, which overlaps with two EGRET sources 3EG J2016+3657 and 3EG J2021+3716 (Mukherjee et al 2000). This talk will review multiwavelength studies of unidentified EGRET sources and their spectral energy distributions, using the above-mentioned sources as examples.


muk@astro.columbia.edu