2017/08/24 by B. Zitzer, Zitzer, Benjamin, Collaboration, VERITAS
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysical Phenomena and Observations #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1708.07444
openalex publication_date 2017/08/24 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In the analysis of VERITAS and other IACT data, it is expected to get a distribution of statistical significances in sky map bins with mean of zero and width of unity in the absence of a γ-ray signal. However, it is not uncommon to see significance distributions of width greater than unity, indicating that the background is poorly estimated and the significances in the region of interest are incorrect. This work explores the origins of these wider significance distributions and develop solutions to this issue and test these solutions on samples of VERITAS data.