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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

An international team of astronomers has detected a new high-mass gamma-ray binary (HMGB) in the Milky Way galaxy. The newly found HMGB, designated 4FGL J1405.1-6119, is one of only a handful of such objects discovered to date. The discovery was announced in a paper published August 28 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

HMGBs consist of an OB star in orbit with a compact object. In these systems, interactions between the two objects result in an emission with spectral energy distribution (SED) peaks above 1.0 MeV. They are assumed to be precursors to high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs). HMGBs are very rare objects. Astronomers estimate that there are about 100 still undetected HMGBs residing in our home galaxy. Moreover, many known gamma-ray sources of as-yet unknown nature, could potentially be high-mass gamma-ray binaries.

A group of astronomers led by Robin Corbet of the University of Maryland has recently conducted a search for gamma-ray binaries. They have analyzed the data collected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, aiming to find signs of periodic modulation in gamma-ray light curves of various sources. The study, complemented by data from NASA's Swift spacecraft and Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), allowed the researchers to determine that one particular source identified by LAT is an HMGB.

"We report the identification from multi-wavelength observations of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) source 4FGL J1405.1-6119 (= 3FGL J1405.4-6119) as a high-mass gamma-ray binary," the astronomers wrote in the paper.

More information: R. H. D. Corbet, et al. Discovery of the Galactic High-Mass Gamma-ray Binary 4FGL J1405.1-6119, arXiv:1908.10764v1 [astro-ph.HE]: arxiv.org/abs/1908.10764

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