Evaluation of Astrophysical Source Strength

In the process of exploring the Universe for (possible) signals of cosmic sources,

we are in general facing a significant amount of background events.

However, despite the overall background, astrophysical sources may yield

an additional signal rate arriving from specific locations.

This brings us to the essential questions :

* Can we identify a possible source signal by measurements ?

* Can we determine (a limit on) the source strength ?

* What is our degree of belief in the presence of a source ?

In these lectures I will introduce various aspects related to the strength of

(astrophysical) sources, and provide a statistical method to address the above questions.

The analysis method is based on Bayesian statistics, and the underlying algorithms

have been implemented in the NcAstrolab facility of the NCFS-Pack analysis framework.

Lecture Notes :

Registered students, NCFS users and guests with login-id have access