Detection and Imaging of the Crab Nebula with the Nuclear Compton Telescope

Abstract

The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne Compton telescope designed for the study of astrophysical sources in the soft gamma-ray regime (200 keV--20 MeV). NCT's ten high-purity germanium crossed-strip detectors measure the deposited energies and three-dimensional positions of gamma-ray interactions in the sensitive volume, and this information is used to restrict the initial photon to a circle on the sky using the Compton scatter technique. Thus NCT is able to perform spectroscopy, imaging, and polarization analysis on soft gamma-ray sources. NCT is one of the next generation of Compton telescopes --- so-called compact Compton telescopes (CCTs) --- which can achieve effective areas comparable to COMPTEL's with an instrument that is a fraction of the size. The Crab Nebula was the primary target for the second flight of the NCT instrument, which occurred on 17--18 May 2009 in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Analysis of 29.3 ks of data from the flight reveals an image of the Crab at a significance of 4-sigma. This is the first reported detection of an astrophysical source by a CCT.

10 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (6)

• Polarization of the Crab pulsar and nebula as observed by the Integral/IBIS telescope
• Event reconstruction in high resolution Compton telescopes
• The High Energy Emission of the Crab Nebula from 20 keV to 6 MeV with INTEGRAL
• The MEGA Advanced Compton Telescope Project
• Compton scattering sequence reconstruction algorithm for the liquid xenon gamma-ray imaging telescope (LXeGRIT)
• Spectroscopy and Imaging Performance of the Liquid Xenon Gamma-Ray Imaging Telescope (LXeGRIT)

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• Imaging the 511 keV positron annihilation sky with COSI
• First observation of MeV gamma-ray universe with bijective imaging spectroscopy using the Electron-Tracking Compton Telescope aboard SMILE-2+
• Free-moving Quantitative Gamma-ray Imaging
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• First flight of the Gamma-Ray Imager/Polarimeter for Solar flares (GRIPS) instrument
• Antimatter in the Universe : Constraints from Gamma-Ray Astronomy
• The first demonstration of the concept of "narrow-FOV Si/CdTe semiconductor Compton camera"
• A Combined Compton and Coded-aperture Telescope for Medium-energy Gamma-ray Astrophysics
• Developing a method for soft gamma-ray Laue lens assembly and calibration
• Jetted Tidal Disruptions of Stars as a Flag of Intermediate Mass Black Holes at High Redshifts
• Feasibility of Observing Gamma-ray Polarization from Cygnus X-1 Using a CubeSat
• Depth Calibration of Double-sided Strip Germanium Detectors for the Compton Spectrometer and Imager Satellite