Detecting and characterizing high energy gamma ray sources

The sky seen in very energetic electromagnetic radiation (often called gamma rays) can be very different from what observe with our bare eyes. The sources of high energy photons can be very different from the sources of visible light.

An important and strong source of high energy photons is our galactic plane, and the astrophysical sources therein. The data from the upcoming CTA observatory will help us discover numerous pulsar haloes in the the TeV (10⁹ eV) energy range. Our researchers in collaboration with researchers from CNRS (France) have quantified the prospects for detecting and characterizing pulsar haloes in observations of the projected Galactic Plane Survey (GPS), using a simple phenomenological diffusion model for individual pulsar haloes and their population in the Milky Way. The research has been published recently in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS link).

The exposure for the planned GPS observations overlaid with synthetic TeV halo population, showing the full Galactic plane. Note that, to preserve the spherical shape of sources, the pulsar halos are plotted assuming the pixel size in the latitude direction. Most sources from the synthetic halo population are in the region that has the deepest exposure. The top panel shows all simulated sources, while the bottom shows only resolved sources (detected with 5σ) according to the assessed sensitivity to pulsar halos derived in this study.

Our researchers are also involved in the search and characterization of galactic and extra-galactic point sources of high energy photons. Deep learning-based algorithms developed for γ-ray data are used for these tasks, as they have so far already shown to be effective in analyzing optical data (ASID-L, ASID-FE).