VHE γ-Ray Observation of the Crab Nebula and its Pulsar with the MAGIC Telescope

By J. Albert, E. Aliu, H. Anderhub, P. Antoranz, A. Armada, C. Baixeras, J. Barrio, H. Bartko, D. Bastieri, J. Becker and 132 more. 2007

274 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report about very high energy (VHE) γ-ray observations of the Crab Nebula with the MAGIC telescope. The γ-ray flux from the nebula was measured between 60 GeV and 9 TeV. The energy spectrum can be described by a curved power law dF/dE = f0(E/300 GeV)[a+blog10(E/300 GeV)] with a flux normalization f0 of (6.0 ± 0.2stat) × 10−10 cm−2 s−1 TeV−1, a = − 2.31 ± 0.06stat, and b = − 0.26 ± 0.07stat. The peak in the spectral energy distribution is estimated at 77 ± 35 GeV. Within the observation time and the experimental resolution of the telescope, the γ-ray emission is steady and pointlike. The emission’s center of gravity coincides with the position of the pulsar. Pulsed γ-ray emission from the pulsar could not be detected. We constrain the cutoff energy of the pulsed spectrum to be less than 27 GeV, assuming that the differential energy spectrum has an exponential cutoff. For a superexponential shape, the cutoff energy can be as high as 60 GeV.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0684882c74b05492ba69415807f4e04720938650

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Bing Zhang
2. Michael Kramer
3. A. Strong
4. E. Orlando
5. F. Tavecchio
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• THE FIRST FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE CATALOG OF GAMMA-RAY PULSARS (2009, methodology): “While the largest minimum r is derived from the 25 GeV detection of the Crab by MAGIC (Albert et al. 2008), significant minimum altitudes of 2 to 3 stellar radii are found for many LAT pulsars with large B12 and high Ecutoff , assuming maximum energies set at around 2.5Ecutoff .”
• INSIGHTS INTO THE HIGH-ENERGY γ-RAY EMISSION OF MARKARIAN 501 FROM EXTENSIVE MULTIFREQUENCY OBSERVATIONS IN THE FERMI ERA (2011, methodology): “At the time of the observation, MAGIC-II, the new second telescope of the current array system, was still in its commissioning phase so that Mrk 501 was observed in stand-alone mode by MAGIC-I, which is in scientific operation since 2004 (Albert et al. 2008).”