1 Introduction

The Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) Telescope will be a large imaging air Cherenkov telescope for ground-based $\gamma$-ray observations above 10 GeV. Details of its design, the scientific motivation, the feasibility of the project, and other issues have been described elsewhere (Barrio et al. 1998). The telescope is expected to become operational by the middle of 2001.

The telescope is optimised to achieve the lowest energy threshold and highest flux sensitivity achievable with present technology. This makes it applicable to a large range of astrophysical research fields:

• Blazars (study of EGRET blazars, possible discovery of additional sources).
• Cosmology (measurements of the near-infrared background via $\gamma$-$\gamma$ absorption).
• Investigation of the pulsed $\gamma$-ray emission from pulsars.
• Search for gamma-emission from Supernova remnants. (and hence search for evidence of production and acceleration of cosmic rays).
• Search for decay/annihilation line-emission from WIMPs clustering at the galactic centre.
• Identification of "unidentified EGRET sources'' (position accuracy $\approx$1.2$^\prime$).
• Search for high-energy counterparts of gamma-ray bursts.

The last part of this scientific program will briefly be discussed in this article.