Speaker
Description
Cosmic ray acceleration up to PeV energies and beyond has been suggested to take place in massive and young star clusters, as supported by the detection of PeV photons from e.g. the Cygnus region. The formation of a strong termination shock driven by the collective action of stellar winds in compact clusters, combined with the action of supernovae occurring in their cores, offer indeed promising locations where efficient particle acceleration might take place. The subsequent hadronic collisions of these particles result into gamma-ray and neutrino production. In such a scenario and by performing synthetic realizations of the star cluster population, in resemblance to the properties of the local population, we compute the expected gamma-ray and neutrino signals. We further evaluate their contribution to the very-high-energy gamma-ray and neutrino diffuse emissions from the Galactic Plane, as measured by LHAASO and IceCube.