The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation ground-based observatory for gamma-ray astronomy at very-high energies. With more than 100 telescopes located in the northern and southern hemispheres, CTA will be the world’s largest and most sensitive high-energy gamma-ray observatory.
Building on the technology of current generation ground-based gamma-ray detectors (H.E.S.S., VERITAS and MAGIC), CTA will be ten times more sensitive and have unprecedented accuracy in its detection of high-energy gamma rays.
With its superior understanding of known objects with the anticipated detection of new classes of gamma-ray emitters and a great potential for fundamentally new discoveries. CTA will transform our understanding of the high-energy Universe by seeking to address a wide range of questions in astrophysics and fundamental physics.
Together, the northern and southern CTA arrays will constitute the CTA Observatory (CTAO), which will be the first ground-based gamma-ray observatory open to the worldwide astronomical and particle physics communities as a resource for data from unique, high-energy astronomical observations.