Supernova Remnants and Pulsar Wind Nebulae in the Cherenkov Telescope Array era

TL;DR

The paper discusses how the Cherenkov Telescope Array will significantly enhance gamma-ray astronomy, focusing on its potential to study pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants with improved sensitivity and resolution.

Contribution

It presents the scientific goals and capabilities of CTA for observing PWNe and SNRs, highlighting its advancements over current gamma-ray observatories.

Findings

CTA will improve sensitivity by a factor of ~10 above 100 GeV.

Enhanced angular and spectral resolution will enable detailed studies of PWNe and SNRs.

CTA's wider field-of-view will facilitate comprehensive surveys of the high-energy universe.

Abstract

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is planned to serve as a ground-based observatory for (very-)high-energy gamma-ray astronomy, open to a wide astrophysics community, providing a deep insight into the non-thermal high-energy universe. It foresees a factor of ~10 improvement in sensitivity above 100 GeV, with substantially better angular and spectral resolutions and wider field-of-view in comparison with currently operational experiments. The CTA consortium is investigating the different physics cases for different proposed array configurations and subsets. Pulsar Wind Nebulae (PWNe), the most numerous VHE Galactic sources, and Supernova Remnants (SNRs), believed to be the acceleration sites of the bulk of cosmic rays, will be two of the main observation targets for CTA. In this contribution, the main scientific goals regarding PWNe and SNRs are discussed, and quantitative examples of the capability of CTA to achieve these objectives are presented.