Observation of the Crab Nebula with the HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory

By A. Abeysekara, A. Albert, R. Alfaro, C. Alvarez, J. Álvarez, R. Arceo, J. C. Arteaga-Vel'azquez, H. Solares, A. Barber, N. Bautista-Elivar and 97 more. 2017

297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Crab Nebula is the brightest TeV gamma-ray source in the sky and has been used for the past 25 years as a reference source in TeV astronomy, for calibration and verification of new TeV instruments. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC), completed in early 2015, has been used to observe the Crab Nebula at high significance across nearly the full spectrum of energies to which HAWC is sensitive. HAWC is unique for its wide field of view, nearly 2 sr at any instant, and its high-energy reach, up to 100 TeV. HAWC’s sensitivity improves with the gamma-ray energy. Above ∼1 TeV the sensitivity is driven by the best background rejection and angular resolution ever achieved for a wide-field ground array. We present a time-integrated analysis of the Crab using 507 live days of HAWC data from 2014 November to 2016 June. The spectrum of the Crab is fit to a function of the form . The data is well fitted with values of α = 2.63 ± 0.03, β = 0.15 ± 0.03, and when E0 is fixed at 7 TeV and the fit applies between 1 and 37 TeV. Study of the systematic errors in this HAWC measurement is discussed and estimated to be ±50% in the photon flux between 1 and 37 TeV. Confirmation of the Crab flux serves to establish the HAWC instrument’s sensitivity for surveys of the sky. The HAWC all-sky survey will be the deepest survey of the northern sky ever conducted in the multi-TeV band.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55fe5b2a3e067c36c0035d7d5252e5fb00a007fe

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Citations in the corpus

The 2HWC HAWC Observatory Gamma-Ray Catalog (2017, methodology): “The threshold crossing times (both rising and falling) are recorded using CAEN V1190A time-to-digital converters (Abeysekara et al. 2017b).”
Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A (2018, background): “No g-ray source above 1 TeV at the location of TXS 0506+056 was found in survey data of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) g-ray observatory (36), either close to the time of the neutrino alert or in archival data taken since November 2014 (25).”
Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger (2017, background): “Support for operations and continuing development of the LWA1 is provided by the National Science Foundation 29 The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 848:L12 (59pp), 2017 October 20 Abbott et al. under grants AST-1139963 and AST-1139974 of the University Radio Observatory program.”