MAGIC (telescope)

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MAGIC 1
The MAGIC Telescope
Organization	MAGIC collaboration
Location	La Palma, Canary Islands
Altitude	2200 m
Wavelength	Gamma rays
Built	2004
Telescope style	Reflector
Diameter	17m
Collecting area	240 m²
Focal length	f/D 1.03
Mounting	metal structure
Website	http://wwwmagic.mppmu.mpg.de/

This article is about the telescope. For other uses, see Magic.

MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescope) is a Gamma-ray telescope situated at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, at about 2200 m above sea level. It detects particle showers released by cosmic gamma-rays, using the Cherenkov radiation, i.e., faint light radiated by the charged particles in the showers. With a diameter of 17 meters for the reflecting surface, it is the largest in the world.

A second MAGIC telescope (MAGIC 2) is close to completion at a distance of 85 m from the first one; it will be inaugurated on September 19, 2008.

MAGIC is sensitive to cosmic gamma rays with energies between 50 GeV and 30 TeV due to its large mirror; other ground-based gamma-ray telescopes typically observe gamma energies above 2-300 GeV. Satellite-based detectors detect gamma-rays in the energy range from keV up to several GeV).

1 Aims
2 Technical specifications
3 Collaborating Institutions
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Aims

The goals of the telescope are to detect and study primarily photons coming from:

Accretion of black holes in Active Galactic Nuclei
Supernova remnants
Some unidentified EGRET Sources
Gamma ray bursts
Annihilation of Dark matter

[edit] Technical specifications

The telescope has the following specifications:

A collecting area 236 m² consisting of 50 cm x 50 cm Aluminium individual reflectors
A lightweight carbon fibre frame
A detector consisting of 396 separate hexagonal photomultiplier detectors in the center

(diameter: 2.54 cm) surrounded by 180 larger photomultiplier detectors (diameter: 3.81 cm).

Data are transferred in analogue form by fibre optic cables
Signal digitization is done via an ADC (analog-digital converter) of frequency 2 GHz
The weight of the whole telescope is 40,000 kg
The reaction time to move to any section of the sky is up to 40 seconds

[edit] Collaborating Institutions

During foggy nights, the laser reference beams of MAGIC's active control can be seen

Physicists from over twenty institutions in Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Finland, Poland, Bulgaria and Armenia collaborate in using MAGIC; the largest groups are at

Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE)
Universitat Complutense Madrid,Spain
Max-Planck-Institute for Physics, Munich, Germany
Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, Universita di Padova Padova, Italy
Tuorla Observatory Piikkiö, Finland
Dipartimento di Fisica and INFN, Universita di Siena Siena, Italy
Dipatimento di Fisica and INFN, Universita di Udine, Italy
Universitaet Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany
Institut for Particle Physics, ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland

[edit] References

C.Baixeras et al. (MAGIC Collaboration), Commissioning and first tests of the MAGIC telescope, Nucl.Inst.Meth. A518, 188 (2004)
J. Albert et al. (MAGIC Collaboration), Variable Very High Energy Gamma-ray Emission from the Microquasar LSI +61 303, Science 312, 1771 (2006)
A. De Angelis and L. Peruzzo, Das Gammastrahlen-Teleskop MAGIC, Sterne und Weltraum, August 2007 (in German); also in Le Scienze, April 2007 (in Italian)