Observation of TeV Gamma Rays from the Crab Nebula with Milagro Using a New Background Rejection Technique
By R. Atkins, W. Benbow, D. Berley, E. Blaufuss, J. Bussons, D. Coyne, R. Delay, T. DeYoung, B. Dingus, D. Dorfan and 35 more. 2003
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The recent advances in TeV gamma-ray astronomy are largely the result of the ability to differentiate between extensive air showers generated by gamma rays and hadronic cosmic rays. Air Cerenkov telescopes have developed and perfected the "imaging" technique over the past several decades. However, until now no background rejection method has been successfully used in an air shower array to detect a source of TeV gamma rays. We report on a method to differentiate hadronic air showers from electromagnetic air showers in the Milagro gamma-ray observatory, based on the ability to detect the energetic particles in an extensive air shower. The technique is used to detect TeV emission from the Crab Nebula. The flux from the Crab Nebula is estimated to be 2.68(±0.42stat ± 1.4sys) × 10-7(E/1 TeV)-2.59 m-2 s-1 TeV-1, where the spectral index is assumed to be as given by the HEGRA collaboration.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5f9080df0269115176b90e8d048d3c8dffd8f928
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Citations in the corpus
- TeV Gamma-Ray Sources from a Survey of the Galactic Plane with Milagro (2007, methodology): “The background at a given location in celestial coordinates is found use the method described in Atkins et al. (2003) with the modification that the events are weighted.”
- Discovery of TeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Cygnus Region of the Galaxy (2006, methodology): “The background due to cosmic ray showers is estimated using the methods described in (Atkins et al. 2003): however, a more efficient parameter to distinguish between gamma rays and cosmic rays has been developed (Abdo 2006a & Abdo 2006b).”
- The Crab Nebula and Pulsar between 500 GeV and 80 TeV: Observations with the HEGRA Stereoscopic Air Cerenkov Telescopes (2004, result): “Recently, the MILAGRO group has published a flux estimate that is consistent with the measurement presented here (Atkins et al. 2003).”
- Teraelectronvolt Astronomy (2010, methodology): “MILAGRO is a 80× 60× 8 m pond instrumented with PMTs and surrounded by 175 water tanks, located at an altitude of 2630 m (Atkins et al. 2003).”
- A Measurement of the Spatial Distribution of Diffuse TeV Gamma-Ray Emission from the Galactic Plane with Milagro (2008, methodology): “This causes the ratio of on to off time in the background calculation (Atkins et al. 2003) to become too big for signal bin sizes of 2 longitude by 4 latitude, the bin size that is used in the Galactic longitude flux profile.”
- The 2HWC HAWC Observatory Gamma-Ray Catalog (2017, methodology): “The HAWC flux is more consistent with the flux measured by Milagro and ARGO than the IACTs, in agreement with possible additional emission components besides the PWN within the region.”
- Observation of the Crab Nebula with the HAWC Gamma-Ray Observatory (2017, methodology): “Knowing the angular resolution and the background in each , the energy spectrum of the Crab Nebula may be inferred from the measured data.”