In this paper, the possibility of periodic pulsar-like gamma-ray emission from the white dwarfs in AE Aquarii and AR Scorpii is investigated. We show that the white dwarf magnetospheres in AE Aquarii and AR Scorpii can possibly induce potentials to accelerate charged particles to energies in excess of one tera electronvolt (TeV) with associated gamma-ray emission through processes such as curvature radiation, inverse Compton, and hadronic processes such as neutral pion decay. We report here pulsed gamma-ray signatures at or close to the spin period of white dwarfs in both AE Aquarii and AR Scorpii in the Fermi-LAT dataset. This may indicate that both these white dwarfs possibly contain a particle accelerator that can produce relativistic electrons and ions and associated high energy radiation. The possibility of pair production is also investigated, which could provide a source for relativistic e± pairs in the magnetosphere. This could possibly be a driver for other forms of lepton-induced multi-wavelength pulsar-like emission from these two systems as well, for example, to explain the recently detected pulsed radio emission from AE Aquarii and R Scorpii in MeerKAT observations at the spin period of the white dwarf. The possibility of future detection of AE Aquarii and AR Scorpii with the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is also discussed. The future Vera Rubin Observatory will make a revolutionary contribution to time-domain astrophysics, which may lead to the discovery of thousands of new transient sources, possibly also many more close binaries with highly spun-up magnetized white dwarfs such as AE Aquarii and AR Scorpii for future investigation.
Previous high energy studies of AR Sco suggest that the surrounding region complicates the search for γ-ray emission from this close binary system. The fact that AR Sco lies close to the Galactic plane, Rho Oph cloud complex and strong nearby VHE Fermi sources, make it difficult to constrain and quantify an upper-limit of the emission from AR Sco's location in the sky. In this study, a search for high energy γ-ray emission was conducted to identify possible pulsed emission signatures within or above the noise level. Period analysis revealed low-level but consistent emission at the spin period of the white dwarf (P s = 117 sec), using Fermi-LAT data from the past decade. Control analysis appears to show a decrease in signal strength at the spin period in regions further away from the coordinates centred on AR Sco, which may indicate the presence of low-level pulsed γ-ray emission from AR Sco.
is a close compact binary system that shows non-thermal, pulsed and highly linear polarized emission. In this study, a search for high energy gamma-ray emission was conducted between 100 MeV-500 GeV by analysing the newly available Fermi-LAT Pass 8 data with the newly available Fermi 1.0.1 Science Tools. Binned likelihood analysis was performed using power law, broken power law and log parabola models. From the selected Region of Interest (ROI) centred on AR Sco's position, we calculated a statistical significance of √ T S ≤ 4.31σ * Speaker.
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