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Abstract: Two of the Key Science Projects of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) consist in performing a deep survey of the Galactic and Extragalactic sky, providing an unbiased view of the Universe at energies above tens of GeV. To optimize the time spent to perform the Extragalactic survey, a so-called “divergent mode” of the CTA was proposed as an alternative observation strategy to the traditional parallel pointing in order to increase its instantaneous field of view. The search for transient VHE sources would also benefit from an extended field of view. In the divergent mode, each telescope points to a position in the sky that is slightly offset, in the outward direction, from the center of the field of view. In this contribution, we present the first performance estimation from full Monte Carlo simulation of possible CTA divergent mode setups.
Keywords: very-high-energy gamma rays, Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) Observatory, CTAO Key Science Projects (KSPs), galactic survey KSP, extragalactic survey KSP
Published in RUNG: 15.11.2024; Views: 429; Downloads: 4
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Abstract: Approximately one hundred sources of very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays are known in the Milky Way, detected with a combination of targeted observations and surveys. A survey of the entire Galactic Plane in the energy range from a few tens of GeV to a few hundred TeV has been proposed as a Key Science Project for the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). This article presents the status of the studies towards the Galactic Plane Survey (GPS). We build and make publicly available a sky model that combines data from recent observations of known gamma-ray emitters with state-of-the-art physically-driven models of synthetic populations of the three main classes of established Galactic VHE sources (pulsar wind nebulae, young and interacting supernova remnants, and compact binary systems), as well as of interstellar emission from cosmic-ray interactions in the Milky Way. We also perform an optimisation of the observation strategy (pointing pattern and scheduling) based on recent estimations of the instrument performance. We use the improved sky model and observation strategy to simulate GPS data corresponding to a total observation time of 1620 hours spread over ten years. Data are then analysed using the methods and software tools under development for real data. Under our model assumptions and for the realisation considered, we show that the GPS has the potential to increase the number of known Galactic VHE emitters by almost a factor of five. This corresponds to the detection of more than two hundred pulsar wind nebulae and a few tens of supernova remnants at average integral fluxes one order of magnitude lower than in the existing sample above 1 TeV, therefore opening the possibility to perform unprecedented population studies. The GPS also has the potential to provide new VHE detections of binary systems and pulsars, to confirm the existence of a hypothetical population of gamma-ray pulsars with an additional TeV emission component, and to detect bright sources capable of accelerating particles to PeV energies (PeVatrons). Furthermore, the GPS will constitute a pathfinder for deeper follow-up observations of these source classes. Finally, we show that we can extract from GPS data an estimate of the contribution to diffuse emission from unresolved sources, and that there are good prospects of detecting interstellar emission and statistically distinguishing different scenarios. Thus, a survey of the entire Galactic plane carried out from both hemispheres with CTAO will ensure a transformational advance in our knowledge of Galactic VHE source populations and interstellar emission.
Keywords: very-high-energy gamma rays, Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, CTAO Galactic Plane Survey, galactic cosmic rays, pulsar wind nebulae, supernova remnants, galactic PeVatrons, binary systems, diffuse emission
Published in RUNG: 28.10.2024; Views: 503; Downloads: 0
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Abstract: The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) is the next-generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory currently under construction. It will improve over the current genera-tion of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) by a factor of five to ten in sensitivity and it will be able to observe the whole sky from a combination of two sites: a northern site in La Palma, Spain, and a southern one in Paranal, Chile. CTAO will also be the first open ground-based gamma-ray observatory. Accordingly, the CTAO data processing pipeline is developed as open-source software and ctapipe will be a core package therein. The event reconstruction pipeline accepts raw data of the telescopes and processes it to produce suitable input for the higher-level science tools. Its primary tasks include reconstructing the physical properties of each recorded air shower and providing the corresponding instrument response functions. ctapipe is a python framework providing algorithms and command-line tools to facilitate raw data calibration, image extraction, image parametrization and event reconstruction. Its current main focus is the analysis of simulated data but it has also been successfully applied for the analysis of data obtained with the CTA prototype telescopes, and first science results have now been obtained by the LST-1 collaboration using ctapipe. A plugin system also allows the processing of non-CTA data. Recent updates, including event reconstruction using machine learning and a new plugin system as well as the roadmap towards a 1.0 release will be presented.
Keywords: Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory, CTAO, ground-based gamma-ray observatory, ctapipe
Published in RUNG: 26.09.2023; Views: 1558; Downloads: 5
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