Juan Cortina: An instrument to survey half of the VHE gamma ray sky: MACHETE

Wednesday 3 Jun 2015, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

Jelena Aleksic (IFAE), Joern Lange (IFAE Barcelona), Stefania Bordoni (IFAE)

Current Cherenkov Telescopes for VHE gamma-ray astrophysics are pointing instruments with a field of view (FOV) up to a few tens of sq.deg, i.e. less than 1/1000 of the sky. This explains why the VHE sky remains poorly explored at these wavelengths. We propose to build an array of two non-steerable telescopes with a FOV of 5 x 60 sq.deg oriented along the meridian. Roughly half of the sky drifts through this FOV in a year. We expect it to survey this half of the sky with an integral flux sensitivity of 0.55% of crab in 5 years, an energy threshold of 150 GeV and an angular resolution of 0.1 deg. For astronomical objects that transit over MACHETE for a specific night, it would achieve an integral sensitivity of 8% of crab in a night. This makes MACHETE a powerful tool to trigger observations of variable sources at VHE or any other wavelengths.