Speaker
Description
The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be the first open, proposal-driven research infrastructure for very-high-energy gamma-ray astronomy. With an order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over existing instruments and an energy range extending from a few tens of GeV to several hundred TeV, CTAO will enable transformative studies of the non-thermal Universe.
Operating arrays in both hemispheres, CTAO will provide unprecedented access to the entire gamma-ray sky and will play a central role in the era of time-domain, multi-wavelength, and multi-messenger astrophysics. Even during its early science phase, the observatory is expected to deliver major scientific discoveries across a broad range of topics.
As construction progresses towards the first intermediate array configurations, CTAO is moving toward the start of science operations. This contribution reviews the current status of the project and discusses the scientific opportunities and expected performance of the initial observatory configurations.
