Revealing the Most Energetic Light from Pulsars and Their Nebulae by David Carreto Fidalgo

Author:David Carreto Fidalgo
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030241940
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

David Carreto Fidalgo1

(1)Faculty of Physics, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

David Carreto Fidalgo

Email: [email protected]

As the sensitivity of single dish Cherenkov telescopes improves and with the eventual construction of new arrays of ground-based Cherenkov telescopes, further observations of pulsar systems should yield definitive data to address the production mechanisms in these systems.

The Whipple Collaboration, 1999

Magic observations are programed yearly and grouped into approximately one year long observation cycles, the first one beginning in May 2005. For each cycle members of the magic collaboration submit observation proposals that form the final night-by-night schedule for the telescopes after an evaluation by a committee of experts. The data analyzed in this thesis correspond to Cycles 2–11 and resulted from various observation campaigns with different scientific goals. It is interesting to note that none of the campaigns had the explicit objective of investigating the Crab pulsar spectrum beyond 400 GeV. Particularly in the early cycles and in cycles after major upgrades, a big fraction of the data came actually from technical proposals to monitor and evaluate the performance of the instrument with no immediate scientific purpose.

In the first Cycles 2, 3 and 4, most of the data were taken with the goal of detecting the Crab pulsar at vhe for the first time and to characterize the spectrum in the newly opened energy window. From Cycle 5 on, it was proposed to monitor the Crab nebula to check for variability. Another proposal that significantly contributed to the data set in Cycle 5, 6, 7 and 8 pursued the precise measurement of the Crab nebula spectrum over three decades in energy, in particular the region above 10 TeV [1]. Apart from the monitoring for technical and variability purposes, Cycle 9, 10 and 11 also included special observations of the Crab at very-high zenith angles (above ) and observations conducted with new trigger systems. Due to the still unclear performances of these special observations we did not include them in our data set.

The analysis of this unusual big data set was a team effort and done in various steps. In his master thesis1 the author of this work analyzed the mono subsample and found a first hint of emission above 400 GeV from the Crab pulsar. The hint was double-checked and confirmed by Garrido Terrats [2]. As a continuation of the work started by Gianluca Giavitto,2 Daniel Galindo reanalyzed all stereo subsamples from 2009 until 2014 and equally found a hint of emission above 400 GeV. The author of this thesis cross-checked and combined the stereo with the mono sample, which ultimately led to a publication of the results in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics [3]. In the following analysis we included some subsamples that were not considered in the publication due to time constraints, namely the m1 9.2, the m1 13.0 and the st.03.06 subsamples (see Table 5.1).Table 5.1List of subsamples

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.