Abstract
LAST year, one of us1 suggested that gamma radiation from the galactic disk observed by Clark et al.2 from OSO-3 arises from the decay of neutral pions produced by cosmic rays interacting with the total nucleon content of interstellar gas, much of which was suggested to be molecular hydrogen. Some tentative support for this hypothesis has come from a presentation by Kraushaar at the thirty-seventh IAU symposium in Rome showing that the spectrum of the OSO-3 gamma rays closely matches the gamma ray spectrum of the horizon albedo from the Earth which arises mainly from the decay of neutral pions produced by the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere.
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STECHER, T., STECKER, F. Origin of Galactic Gamma Rays. Nature 226, 1234–1235 (1970). https://doi.org/10.1038/2261234a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/2261234a0
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