Prospects for PWNe and SNRs science with the ASTRI mini-array of pre-production small-sized telescopes of the Cherenkov Telescope Array

TL;DR

The paper evaluates the scientific potential of the ASTRI mini-array, a Cherenkov Telescope Array component, for studying pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants to understand cosmic ray origins, through detailed simulations of gamma-ray sources.

Contribution

It presents the first detailed simulation-based assessment of the ASTRI mini-array's capabilities for VHE gamma-ray astronomy and cosmic ray source investigation.

Findings

ASTRI mini-array can resolve diffuse gamma-ray emission effectively.

It can detect pulsars and SNRs with high significance.

Potential to discover PeVatrons near the cosmic-ray knee energy.

Abstract

The development and construction of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) opens up new opportunities for the study of very high energy (VHE, E>100 GeV) sources. As a part of CTA, the ASTRI project, led by INAF, has one of the main goals to develop one of the mini-arrays of CTA pre-production telescopes, proposed to be installed at the CTA southern site. Thanks to the innovative dual-mirror optical design of its small-sized telescopes, the ASTRI mini-array will be characterized by a large field of view, an excellent angular resolutioerrorn and a good sensitivity up to energies of several tens of TeV. Pulsar wind nebulae, along with Supernova Remnants, are among the most abundant sources that will be identified and investigated, with the ultimate goal to move significantly closer to an understanding of the origin of cosmic rays (CR). As part of the ongoing effort to investigate the scientific capabilities for both CTA as a whole and the ASTRI mini-array, we performed simulations of the Vela X region. We simulated its extended VHE gamma-ray emission using the results of the detailed H.E.S.S. analysis of this source. We estimated the resolving capabilities of the diffuse emission and the detection significance of the pulsar with both CTA as a whole and the ASTRI mini-array. Moreover with these instruments it will be possible to observe the high-energy end of SNRs spectrum, searching for particles with energies near the cosmic-rays "knee" (E~10^15 eV). We simulated a set of ASTRI mini-array observations for one young and an evolved SNRs in order to test the capabilities of this instrument to discover and study PeVatrons on the Galactic plane.