Scientists operating the newly commissioned High Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory have presented the deepest survey map to date of the highest-energy gamma ray sources in the northern sky.
The team, which includes faculty and students from Michigan State University, presented its findings at this week’s meeting of the American Physical Society.
Completed in March 2015, HAWC is a new observatory that studies high-energy gamma rays and cosmic rays that come from extreme sources such as black holes, dark matter and exploding stars.
The HAWC sky map shows a clear picture of gamma-ray emitting objects in the galactic plane – many undetected by previous searches. HAWC images of some of these sources resolve details of their internal structure, shedding light on the dynamics of ultra-high energy particles in sources such as pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants.
Located 13,500 feet above sea level near Puebla, Mexico, HAWC is the newest tool available to visualize these explosive events and learn more about the nature of high-energy radiation, possessing approximately 15 times the sensitivity of previous gamma-ray survey instruments.
MSU physics and astronomy professors James Linnemann, Kirsten Tollefson and Tyce DeYoung led a team of postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate students who helped to build the detector and are now developing many of the key systems that collect and analyze HAWC data, plus monitor its operations.
“HAWC is starting to see new sources of very high-energy gamma-ray showers that have never been detected before,” said Linnemann, who was the HAWC electronics coordinator during construction. “HAWC partners with other observatories to study such new sources and shares information on possible new sources even before the official scientific publication of HAWC results, allowing collaborative studies for maximum scientific impact.”
Tollefson, who serves as deputy manager of the HAWC detector, said that the new sky map shows that HAWC is working well.
“We are excited to study these new sources, but the MSU group is using this data to put constraints on dark matter models and searching for evaporating primordial black holes,” she said.
The HAWC team is an international collaboration of approximately 120 scientists from 25 universities and national labs in the United States, Mexico and Europe. HAWC was built with the support of the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología in Mexico.