2024/05/29 by C. A. Manzari, Yujin Park, Manzari, Claudio Andrea +5 · 14 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.19393
openalex publication_date 2024/05/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
It has long been established that axions could have been produced within the nascent proto-neutron-star formed following the type II supernova SN1987A, escaped the star due to their weak interactions, and then converted to gamma-rays in the Galactic magnetic fields; the non-observation of a gamma-ray flash coincident with the neutrino burst leads to strong constraints on the axion-photon coupling for axion masses ma \lesssim 10-10 eV. In this work we use SN1987A to constrain higher mass axions, all the way to ma ∼ 10-3 eV, by accounting for axion production from the Primakoff process, nucleon bremsstrahlung, and pion conversion along with axion-photon conversion on the still-intact magnetic fields of the progenitor star. Moreover, we show that gamma-ray observations of the next Galactic supernova, leveraging the magnetic fields of the progenitor star, could detect quantum chromodynamics axions for masses above roughly 50 μeV, depending on the supernova. We propose a new full-sky gamma-ray satellite constellation that we call the GALactic AXion Instrument for Supernova (GALAXIS) to search for such future signals along with related signals from extragalactic neutron star mergers.