The VERITAS survey of the cygnus region of the galactic plane

Abstract

VERITAS is an array of imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes, located in southern Arizona, that operates in the 100 GeV to 50 TeV energy range. With VERITAS we have conducted a survey of the Cygnus region of the Galactic plane in a region defined by 67° < 82° and -1° < b < 4°. The Cygnus region was chosen for a blind search due to its high content of potential Very High-Energy (VHE, <100 GeV) gamma-ray sources (including supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, X-Ray binaries and stellar OB associations) as well as several previously discovered VHE sources. There are also several high-energy gamma-ray emitters in this region as detected by the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope. The survey has accumulated more than 140 hours of observations and reaches an estimated point-source VHE sensitivity of ∼4% of the Crab Nebula flux above an energy threshold of 200 GeV. We present details of the survey, analysis, initial results and follow-up observations. © Copyright owned by the author(s) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Licence.