Pulsars, transients and relativistic astrophysics

Abstract:

Son Of X-Shooter (SOXS) will be a new instrument designed to be mounted at the Nasmyth–A focus of the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope in La Silla site (Chile). SOXS is composed of two high-efficiency spectrographs with a resolution slit product 4500, working in the visible (350 – 850 nm) and NIR (800 – 2000 nm) range respectively, and a light imager in the visible (the acquisition camera usable also for scientific purposes). The science case is very broad, it ranges from moving minor bodies in the solar system, to bursting young stellar objects, cataclysmic variables and X-ray binary transients in our Galaxy, supernovae and tidal disruption events in the local Universe, up to gamma-ray bursts in the very distant and young Universe, basically encompassing all distance scales and astronomy branches. At the moment, the instrument passed the Preliminary Design Review by ESO (July 2017) and the Final Design (with FDR in July 2018).

Abstract:

Fermi LAT data revealed classical novae as unexpected gamma-ray sources, yet only 6 of 69 of those optically detected in the first 8 years of Fermi LAT observations were confirmed as > 5? gamma-ray sources. These proceedings outline Monte Carlo simulations in which a population of Galactic novae were simulated based on spatial distributions and R-band magnitudes based on their M31 counterparts. Interstellar extinction was added using a double exponential disc model, and gamma-ray properties were defined based on those of the original 6 gamma-ray novae. We demonstrate that observations are consistent will all classical novae being gamma-ray sources, and that the gamma-ray sky background is the largest inhibitor when discovering these sources. Furthermore, we predict that all classical novae occurring within ? 8 kpc and with m R ? 12 will be detected using the Fermi LAT.