Hadrons or Leptons? That is the question!

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Extragalactic jets shine across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, emitting radiation from radio waves up to very high-energy gamma rays. In the past decades, astrophysicists have been able to grasp several aspects of the functioning of these structures, thought to be launched by rotating magnetic fields close to the horizon of supermassive black holes. One of the most basic questions about jets is the one related to the nature of the radiating particles and the mechanisms at the base of the emission that we observe…

Surveying the Large Magellanic Cloud

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If you gaze up at a dark night sky, you can easily see the Milky Way, the barred-spiral galaxy hosting our solar system. If you are in the southern hemisphere, you can even spot one of our closest neighbor galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC may be much smaller than the Milky Way, but it is the fourth largest galaxy in our Local Galaxy Group and full of a variety of interesting known and candidate sources of gamma-ray photons.