Prospects for PWNe and SNRs science with the ASTRI mini-array of pre-production small-sized telescopes of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

Abstract

The development and construction of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) opens up new opportunities for the study of very high energy (VHE, E>100 GeV) sources. As a part of CTA, the ASTRI project, led by INAF, has one of the main goals to develop one of the mini-arrays of CTA pre-production telescopes, proposed to be installed at the CTA southern site. Thanks to the innovative dual-mirror optical design of its small-sized telescopes, the ASTRI mini-array will be characterized by a large field of view, an excellent angular resolutioerrorn and a good sensitivity up to energies of several tens of TeV. Pulsar wind nebulae, along with Supernova Remnants, are among the most abundant sources that will be identified and investigated, with the ultimate goal to move significantly closer to an understanding of the origin of cosmic rays (CR). As part of the ongoing effort to investigate the scientific capabilities for both CTA as a whole and the ASTRI mini-array, we performed simulations of the Vela X region. We simulated its extended VHE gamma-ray emission using the results of the detailed H.E.S.S. analysis of this source. We estimated the resolving capabilities of the diffuse emission and the detection significance of the pulsar with both CTA as a whole and the ASTRI mini-array. Moreover with these instruments it will be possible to observe the high-energy end of SNRs spectrum, searching for particles with energies near the cosmic-rays "knee" (E~10^15 eV). We simulated a set of ASTRI mini-array observations for one young and an evolved SNRs in order to test the capabilities of this instrument to discover and study PeVatrons on the Galactic plane.

arXiv comment6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. In Proceedings of the 2016 Heidelberg Symposium on High Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy

References in corpus (14)

• Design Concepts for the Cherenkov Telescope Array
• SUMSS: A Wide-Field Radio Imaging Survey of the Southern Sky. I. Science goals, survey design and instrumentation
• The Molonglo Galactic Plane Survey (MGPS-2): Compact Source Catalogue
• Fermi LAT Observations of the Supernova Remnant W28 (G6.4-0.1)
• Wide field aplanatic two-mirror telescopes for ground-based gamma-ray astronomy
• The Vela Pulsar: Results from the First Year of Fermi LAT Observations
• Discovery of gamma-ray emission from the shell-type supernova remnant RCW 86 with H.E.S.S
• GammaLib and ctools: A software framework for the analysis of astronomical gamma-ray data
• Fermi Large Area Telescope observations of the Vela-X Pulsar Wind Nebula
• Probing the radio to X-ray connection of the Vela X PWN with Fermi LAT and H.E.S.S
• The Vela-X Pulsar Wind Nebula revisited with 4 years of Fermi-Large Area Telescope observations
• Fermi Large Area Telescope Detection of Supernova Remnant RCW 86
• Deep morphological and spectral study of the SNR RCW 86 with Fermi-LAT
• The INAF ASTRI Project in the framework of CTA