High-Energy Gamma Rays From Super Powerful Blazar Studied By NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope

MessageToEagle.com – They are among the most fascinating cosmic phenomena. Astronomers know them as blazars and each of them harbors a supermassive black hole and jets emanating in opposite directions from near its poles.

These sources are unique evidence of the most extreme speeds and energies known in the extreme Universe.

Only one blazar would be enough to endanger our existence so it is good that none of them is located too close to our planet Earth.

High-energy gamma rays from super powerful blazar are now studied by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

“When we looked at all the data from this event, from gamma rays to radio, we realized the measurements told us something we didn’t expect about how the black hole produced this energy,” said Jonathan Biteau at the Nuclear Physics Institute of Orsay, France. He led the study of results from the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS), a gamma-ray telescope in Arizona.

Astronomers had assumed that light at different energies came from regions at different distances from the black hole. Gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light, were thought to be produced closest to the black hole.

“Instead, the multiwavelength picture suggests that light at all wavelengths came from a single region located far away from the power source,” Biteau explained.

The gamma rays came from a galaxy known as PKS 1441+25, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. Located toward the constellation Boötes, the galaxy is so far away its light takes 7.6 billion years to reach us. At its heart lies a monster black hole with a mass estimated at 70 million times the sun’s and a surrounding disk of hot gas and dust.

If placed at the center of our solar system, the black hole’s event horizon — the point beyond which nothing can escape — would extend almost to the orbit of Mars.

In April, PKS 1441+25 underwent a major eruption and a team of researchers led by Luigi Pacciani at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome,  in collaboration with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cerenkov experiment (MAGIC), located on La Palma in the Canary Islands. began observations of the phenomenon.

Using public Fermi data, Pacciani discovered the outburst and immediately alerted the astronomical community. Fermi’s Large Area Telescope revealed gamma rays up to 33 billion electron volts (GeV), reaching into the highest-energy part of the instrument’s detection range. For comparison, visible light has energies between about 2 and 3 electron volts.

“Detecting these very energetic gamma rays with Fermi, as well as seeing flaring at optical and X-ray energies with NASA’s Swift satellite, made it clear that PKS 1441+25 had become a good target for MAGIC,” Pacciani said.

Following up on the Fermi alert, the MAGIC team turned to the blazar and detected gamma rays with energies ranging from 40 to 250 GeV.

“Because this galaxy is so far away, we didn’t have a strong expectation of detecting gamma rays with energies this high,” said Josefa Becerra Gonzalez, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who analyzed Fermi LAT data as part of the MAGIC study. “There are fewer and fewer gamma rays at progressively higher energies, and fewer still from very distant sources.”

The reason distance matters for gamma rays is that they convert into particles when they collide with lower-energy light. The farther away the blazar is, the less likely its highest-energy gamma rays will survive to be detected.

VERITAS also detected gamma rays with energies approaching 200 GeV. The finding also provides insight into a phenomenon known as extragalactic background light (EBL), a faint haze of light that suffuses the universe. The EBL comes from all the stars and galaxies that have ever existed, and in a sense can track the history of the universe.

For more information about NASA’s Fermi, visit: www.nasa.gov/fermi

Research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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via NASA