Prospects for a survey of the Galactic plane with the Cherenkov Telescope Array
CTA Consortium

TL;DR
This paper discusses the development and potential scientific impact of a Galactic Plane survey with the Cherenkov Telescope Array, aiming to significantly increase known VHE gamma-ray sources and enable new astrophysical insights.
Contribution
It presents a comprehensive sky model, optimized observation strategies, and simulation results demonstrating the survey's potential to vastly expand VHE source detections and studies.
Findings
Potential to increase known VHE emitters by nearly five times
Detection of over 200 pulsar wind nebulae and dozens of supernova remnants
Ability to detect new binary systems, pulsars, and PeVatrons
Abstract
Approximately one hundred sources of very-high-energy (VHE) gamma rays are known in the Milky Way. A survey of the entire Galactic Plane in the energy range from a few tens of GeV to a few hundred TeV has been proposed as a Key Science Project for the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO). This article presents the status of the studies towards the Galactic Plane Survey (GPS). We build and make publicly available a sky model that combines data from observations of known gamma-ray emitters with state-of-the-art physically-driven models of synthetic populations of the main classes of established Galactic VHE sources, as well as of interstellar emission from cosmic-ray interactions in the Milky Way. We also perform an optimisation of the observation strategy. We use the improved sky model and observation strategy to simulate GPS data that are analysed using the methods and…
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