20 years of MAGIC: The twin telescope on the island of La Palma (Photo: Chiara Righi/MAGIC Collaboration)

20 years of MAGIC: The twin telescope on the island of La Palma (Photo: Chiara Righi/MAGIC Collaboration)

20 MAGIC years of gamma-ray astronomy at MPP

In 2003, a success story of astrophysics began on La Palma: 20 years ago in October, the first MAGIC telescope was inaugurated on the Canary Island, a huge instrument with a mirror diameter of 17 meters. Five years later, the twin MAGIC II telescope followed. The two Cherenkov telescopes measure high-energy gamma rays from our Milky Way and distant galaxies. This allows astrophysicists to study fascinating objects such as stellar explosions, pulsars, black holes and gamma-ray bursts. The Max Planck Institute for Physics has been involved from the very beginning, and is currently responsible for several critically important parts of the telescope, like the overall structure and the camera.

With the two MAGIC telescopes, researchers succeeded in gaining significant insights into high-energy phenomena. This is evidenced by the more than 200 papers that have been published in scientific journals since "first light". These include, for example, the sensational observation of the first gamma-ray burst measured at very high gamma-ray energies.

In addition, the two instruments succeeded in tracking a rare cosmic neutrino. Thus, its probable point of origin - an active black hole in a galaxy in the constellation of Orion - could be clarified. And just recently, a nova observation provided important clues to the origin of ubiquitous cosmic rays.

Fit at old age

"The two telescopes are like a good wine: they improve with age - or in other words, we keep getting new, fantastic research results," says David Paneque, a scientist at MPP and spokesman for the MAGIC collaboration. Critical to new discoveries are the telescopes' ability to detect gamma rays of energy below 200 GeV (200 billion times the energy of the visible light), which is unique among the Cherenkov telescopes.

"It takes just over 30 seconds to slew the telescopes, which are relatively light, below 70 tons in the desired direction," explains David Paneque. "That's an important requirement, especially for recording short-lived events like the flash of a gamma-ray burst."

The future of gamma-ray astronomy

The MAGIC telescopes are undergoing continuous maintenance and development, so they are expected to keep competitive in the next years, while the new generation of Cherenkov Telescopes are being built. "On La Palma, there will be a whole array of telescopes that we can use to observe gamma rays," David Paneque enthuses. "The first telescope with a 23-meter mirror diameter was already inaugurated in 2018, and three more of these large telescopes are already under construction." In addition, several more medium-sized telescopes are planned for the site.

The MAGIC telescopes are dedicated to scientist Florian Goebel, who died in an accident during the construction of the second MAGIC telescope, in 2008.