HAWC detection of TeV emission near PSR B0540+23
ATel #10941; Colas Riviere (University of Maryland), Henrike Fleischhack (Michigan Technological University), Andres Sandoval (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) on behalf of the HAWC collaboration
on 9 Nov 2017; 23:11 UT
Credential Certification: Colas Riviere (riviere@umd.edu)
Subjects: Gamma Ray, TeV, VHE, Pulsar
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) collaboration reports the discovery of a new TeV gamma-ray source HAWC J0543+233.
It was discovered in a search for extended sources of radius 0.5° in a dataset of 911 days (ranging from November 2014 to August 2017) with a test statistic value of 36 (6σ pre-trials), following the method presented in Abeysekara et al. 2017, ApJ, 843, 40.
The measured J2000.0 equatorial position is RA=85.78°, Dec=23.40° with a statistical uncertainty of 0.2°.
HAWC J0543+233 was close to passing the selection criteria of the 2HWC catalog (Abeysekara et al. 2017, ApJ, 843, 40, see HAWC J0543+233 in 2HWC map), which it now fulfills with the additional data.
HAWC J0543+233 is positionally coincident with the pulsar PSR B0540+23 (Edot = 4.1e+34 erg s-1, dist = 1.56 kpc, age = 253 kyr).
It is the third low Edot, middle-aged pulsar announced to be detected with a TeV halo, along with Geminga and B0656+14.
It was predicted to be one of the next such detection by HAWC by Linden et al., 2017, arXiv:1703.09704.
Using a simple source model consisting of a disk of radius 0.5°, the measured spectral index is -2.3 ± 0.2 and the differential flux at 7 TeV is (7.9 ± 2.3) × 10^-15 TeV-1 cm-2 s-1.
The errors are statistical only. Further morphological and spectral analysis as well as studies of the systematic uncertainty are ongoing.