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MAGIC and the Crab Pulsar: History and Motivation

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Revealing the Most Energetic Light from Pulsars and Their Nebulae

Part of the book series: Springer Theses ((Springer Theses))

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Abstract

Since the commissioning of the first magic telescope in 2004 (see Sect. 3.3), the magic collaboration has always considered the Crab nebula and pulsar as valuable targets for observational campaigns and scientific research. To date approximately 14% of all the stored magic data were taken on the Crab (nebula and pulsar). However, a significant portion of this 14% was taken as technical data to evaluate the performance of the instrument as described in Sect. 3.4, and had no immediate scientific purpose. A short summary of the scientific observational campaigns on the Crab is given in Chap. 5.

In this configuration, we detected pulsed \(\gamma \) -rays from the Crab pulsar that were greater than 25 giga–electron volts, revealing a relatively high cutoff energy in the phase-averaged spectrum.

The magic Collaboration, 2008

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Notes

  1. 1.

    That is the radius of the neutron star itself, which is around 10 km.

  2. 2.

    Except the very first paper when the sum trigger was still not available [8].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Physics, Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    David Carreto Fidalgo

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Carreto Fidalgo, D. (2019). MAGIC and the Crab Pulsar: History and Motivation. In: Revealing the Most Energetic Light from Pulsars and Their Nebulae. Springer Theses. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24194-0_4

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