Colloq Abstract - Dingus
August 30, 2019
11:00am Mountain
Brenda Dingus (LANL)
Surveying the TeV Sky with the HAWC Observatory
Abstract
The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is a continuously operating (>95% on-time), wide field-of-view (~2 sr) TeV gamma-ray detector located at 14000’ above sea level in Puebla, Mexico. HAWC has detected nearly 50 Galactic sources at TeV energies of which ~1/4 were not previously known. Several of these are detected up to 100 TeV energies. Notable among these are the lobes of the microquasar SS433 and the nearby extended pulsar wind nebula Geminga. In addition, HAWC has strongly detected the two active galactic nuclei Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 which are monitored daily and observed to be variable. The HAWC data are searched in real time for other transient events (e.g. gamma-ray bursts, high energy neutrinos, gravitational waves, and fast radio bursts) allowing for multi-wavelength and multi-messenger observations. Also, within the region surveyed by HAWC are many dark matter rich objects, such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies, and these HAWC data place the strongest constraints to date on annihilating or decaying dark matter with masses >10 TeV. In this talk I will discuss my favorite HAWC sources and the implications of the HAWC observations.
