Highlights from the HAWC Observatory

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory enters its fourth year of operation since its inauguration in 2015. Located on the Volcan Sierra Negra in Mexico, HAWC is a versatile instrument primarily designed for the observation of the TeV gamma-ray sky. With a wide field-of-view, high duty-cycle, and large energy range, HAWC surveys 2/3rd of the sky and monitors for variable sources and transients. HAWC is a powerful instrument to study key aspects of astrophysics and particle physics, including the production, propagation, and interaction of cosmic rays, searches for dark matter, and Lorentz invariance violation. It has unique capabilities to observe extended sources and pushes energy measurements to unexplored regions, which led e.g. to the discovery of TeV halos around middle-aged nearby pulsars and shed new light on the positron excess puzzle. An outrigger array is currently being deployed to improve the high energy response even further. HAWC is looking at a variety of galactic and extragalactic objects, such as PWN, SNR, binaries, blazars, GRBs, or the Fermi-bubbles. New sources are discovered, some of which are unidentified and are being investigated jointly with other gamma-ray instruments such as IACTs and satellites. Analysis of GRBs, gravitational wave events, and neutrino events are also performed. This talk will present the status, highlight the recent results, and discuss future prospects of the experiment.