VERITAS Observations of The Galactic Center Ridge

TL;DR

This paper presents VERITAS observations of the Galactic Center Ridge from 2010-2014, providing improved spectra, detections of sources, and evidence of extended TeV emission along the Galactic plane.

Contribution

It offers new measurements of TeV spectra for SgrA* and G0.9+0.1, and reports on extended and localized TeV emission features in the Galactic Center region.

Findings

Improved TeV spectra for SgrA* and G0.9+0.1

Detection of extended emission along the Galactic plane

Identification of VER J1746-289 as a TeV emission enhancement

Abstract

The Galactic Center Ridge has been observed extensively in the past by both GeV and TeV instruments revealing a wealth of structure, including both a diffuse component, the point sources G0.9+0.1 (a composite supernova remnant) and SgrA* (believed to be associated with the super massive black hole located at the center of our galaxy). Previous observations (> 300 GeV) with the H.E.S.S. array have also detected an extended TeV component along the Galactic plane due to either diffuse emission or a host of unresolved point sources. Here we report on the VERITAS observations of the Galactic Center Ridge from 2010-2014 in the energy range above 2 TeV. From these observations we 1.) Provide improved measurements of the differential energy spectra for SgrA* in the multi-TeV regime, 2.) Provide a detection in the >2 TeV band of the composite SNR G0.9+0.1 and an improvement of its multi-TeV energy spectrum. 3.) Report on the detection of an extended component of emission along the Galactic plane by VERITAS. 4.) Report on the detection of VER J1746-289, a localized enhancement of TeV emission along the Galactic plane.