2017/07/13 by M. Holler, Holler, M., D. Berge +8
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Particle Detector Development and Performance #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1707.04196
In Proceedings of the 35th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC2017), Busan, Korea
arxiv created 2017/07/13 · openalex publication_date 2017/07/13 · openalex created_date 2017/07/21 · arxiv updated 2019/08/14 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The resolution power of current Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes is presently restricted to scales of a few arcminutes. In the very high-energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) gamma-ray regime, the measurement of source sizes that are comparable to or smaller than the resolution of the instrument is usually limited by statistics and in particular by the uncertainties in the characterisation of the instrument Point Spread Function (PSF). The PSF varies strongly with observation and instrument conditions, demanding time-dependent simulations of these conditions. Employing such simulations, we substantially improve our understanding of the H.E.S.S. PSF and are now able to probe source extensions well below one arcminute scale. We present the results of this new approach applied to known VHE gamma-ray sources and show how this enables us to reveal for the first time the extension of the Crab nebula at TeV gamma-ray energies, with a width of 52 arcsec assuming a Gaussian source shape.