The Crab Nebula as a standard candle in very high-energy astrophysics

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Erscheinungsjahr:
2010
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Text
Beschreibung:
  • The continuum high-energy gamma-ray emission between 1 GeV and 105 GeV from the Crab Nebula has been measured for the first time in overlapping energy bands by the Fermi large-area telescope (Fermi/LAT) below  ≈100 GeV and by ground-based imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) above  ≈60 GeV. To follow up on the phenomenological approach suggested by Hillas et al. (1998), the broad band spectral and spatial measurement (from radio to low-energy gamma-rays  <1 GeV) is used to extract the shape of the electron spectrum. While this model per construction provides an excellent description of the data at energies  <1 GeV, the predicted inverse Compton component matches the combined Fermi/LAT and IACT measurements remarkably well after including all relevant seed photon fields and fitting the average magnetic field to . The close match of the resulting broad band inverse Compton component with the combined Fermi/LAT and IACTs data is used to derive instrument specific energy-calibration factors. These factors can be used to combine data from Fermi/LAT and IACTs without suffering from systematic uncertainties on the common energy scale. As a first application of the cross calibration, we derive an upper limit to the diffuse gamma-ray emission between 250 GeV and 1 TeV based upon the combined measurements of Fermi/LAT and the H.E.S.S. ground-based Cherenkov telescopes. Finally, the predictions of the magneto-hydrodynamic flow model of Kennel & Coroniti (1984) are compared to the measured SED.
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  • info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
Quellsystem:
Forschungsinformationssystem der UHH

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oai:www.edit.fis.uni-hamburg.de:publications/a2b3e086-7785-4ce3-a71e-b1eee463c06d