Gamma-ray bursts are some of the most powerful events in the Universe and are one of the many transient phenomena the CTAO will target in the hopes of bringing further clarity to their physics and discovering entirely new objects.

Credit: NAOJ

Galaxies hosting an actively accreting supermassive black hole, called ‘active galaxies,’ are among the most luminous objects in the extragalactic sky and emit light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Feedback from their active galactic nucleus (AGN) is believed to influence the evolution of the host galaxy and even the galaxy cluster.

Credit: NASA/CXC/CfA

Gamma rays are a powerful tool to study cosmic rays in star-forming environments, and the CTAO observations of star-forming systems will help to reveal the relationship between high-energy particles and the star-formation process. This image of one of the CTAO’s targets, Messier 82, is a star forming system in the constellation Ursa Major.

Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a unique galaxy that hosts a wide range of objects of interest to the CTAO. Observations of this star-forming galaxy will address many CTAO science objectives: population studies of supernova remnants and pulsar wind nebulae, transport of cosmic rays on large scales and the search for dark matter.

Credit: Bucksnort Observatory

Surveys of our own Galaxy provide essential, large-scale data sets, which form the foundation for galactic science at all photon energies. The region within a few degrees of the Galactic Centre is rich with a wide variety of high-energy emitters. This simulation of what we think the CTAO will see adds hundreds of objects to existing findings.

When certain stars reach the end of their natural lifetime they die in a gigantic explosion called a supernova. The explosion causes a large part of the star’s shell to be expelled at very high speeds creating shock fronts called supernova remnants (SNRs). This image is of the Tycho’s supernova (SN 1572) as seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Pulsars are neutron stars that are highly magnetized and rotate at enormous speeds. As its rotation slows, it creates a pulsar wind, and as the wind slows it spreads into a “cloud” called a pulsar wind nebulae. A hot pulsar spinning 30 times per second powers the Crab Nebula and serves as a “standard candle” for Cherenkov telescopes.

Credit: ASU, CXC, HST, NRAO, NSF, NASA

Cosmic rays are accelerated to extremely high energies, traveling close to the speed of light. Cosmic rays constantly bombard the Earth, but their sources are still not clear. Some gamma rays are by-products of high-energy cosmic ray interactions and can be studied to find their sources and the roles they play in our Galaxy and beyond.

Credit: NSF/J.Yang