Detection and Imaging of the Crab Nebula with the Nuclear Compton Telescope
Abstract
The Nuclear Compton Telescope (NCT) is a balloon-borne Compton telescope designed for the study of astrophysical sources in the soft gamma-ray regime (200 keV--20 MeV). NCT's ten high-purity germanium crossed-strip detectors measure the deposited energies and three-dimensional positions of gamma-ray interactions in the sensitive volume, and this information is used to restrict the initial photon to a circle on the sky using the Compton scatter technique. Thus NCT is able to perform spectroscopy, imaging, and polarization analysis on soft gamma-ray sources. NCT is one of the next generation of Compton telescopes --- so-called compact Compton telescopes (CCTs) --- which can achieve effective areas comparable to COMPTEL's with an instrument that is a fraction of the size. The Crab Nebula was the primary target for the second flight of the NCT instrument, which occurred on 17--18 May 2009 in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Analysis of 29.3 ks of data from the flight reveals an image of the Crab at a significance of 4-sigma. This is the first reported detection of an astrophysical source by a CCT.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1106.0323,
title = {Detection and Imaging of the Crab Nebula with the Nuclear Compton Telescope},
author = {M. S. Bandstra and E. C. Bellm and S. E. Boggs and D. Perez-Becker and A. Zoglauer and H. -K. Chang and J. -L. Chiu and J. -S. Liang and Y. -H. Chang and Z. -K. Liu and W. -C. Hung and M. -H. A. Huang and S. J. Chiang and R. -S. Run and C. -H. Lin and M. Amman and P. N. Luke and P. Jean and P. von Ballmoos and C. B. Wunderer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1106.0323},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal