VERITAS Source Catalog

The Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) is a major ground-based gamma-ray observatory operating at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory (FLWO) in southern Arizona, USA. It is an array of four 12m optical telescopes for gamma-ray astronomy in the GeV - TeV energy range. VERITAS is an imaging air Cerenkov system. Gamma-rays from astrophysical sources create particle showers in the Earth's upper atmosphere that produce Cerenkov photons detected on the ground using the large optical telescopes. These telescopes are deployed such that they have the highest sensitivity in the VHE energy band (50 GeV - 50 TeV), with maximum sensitivity from 100 GeV to 10 TeV. The four telescope array is needed for stereoscopic observations that allow the reconstruction of the particle shower geometry, thus giving precise angular and energy resolution. This very high energy observatory, completed in 2007, effectively complements the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope due to its large collection area as well as its higher energy bound and improved angular resolution. VERITAS started four-telescope operations in 2007 and collects about 1100 hours of good-weather data per year. The VERITAS collaboration has published over 100 journal articles since 2008 reporting on gamma-ray observations of a large variety of objects: Galactic sources like supernova remnants, pulsar wind nebulae, and binary systems; extragalactic sources like star forming galaxies, dwarf-spheroidal galaxies, and highly-variable active galactic nuclei. Additional details are available at the <a href="https://veritas.sao.arizona.edu/">VERITAS website</a>. The catalog lists the sources observed by VERITAS as of April 2022, including cross-matches with other gamma-ray observations and spectral fits. This catalog has associated high-level data products containing data from VERITAS publications. This database table was ingested by the HEASARC in December 2022 and is based upon data files provided by the VERITAS Team. A minor correction to one entry in the catalog was made in April 2024. <p> High-level data products were collected from VERITAS publications. Data and fit results were extracted from the published papers or from internal VERITAS analysis results used to produce the published figures and tables. In many cases, spectral and light curve data were obtained by digitizing published figures. This process was led by Gernot Maier at DESY with contributions from many members of the VERITAS collaboration. The primary archive can be accessed on <a href="https://github.com/VERITAS-Observatory/VERITAS-VTSCat">GitHub</a> or downloaded via Zenodo (doi:10.5281/zenodo.6163391). Translation to formats suitable for the HEASARC was led by Philip Kaaret with assistance by Sameer Patel at the University of Iowa and by the HEASARC Team. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC.