FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE GAMMA-RAY DETECTION OF THE RADIO GALAXY M87

By A. Abdo, M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, W. Atwood, M. Axelsson, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol and 173 more. 2009

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) discovery of high-energy (MeV/GeV) γ-ray emission positionally consistent with the center of the radio galaxy M87, at a source significance of over 10σ in 10 months of all-sky survey data. Following the detections of Cen A and Per A, this makes M87 the third radio galaxy seen with the LAT. The faint point-like γ-ray source has a >100 MeV flux of 2.45 (±0.63) × 10−8 photons cm−2 s−1 (photon index = 2.26 ± 0.13) with no significant variability detected within the LAT observation. This flux is comparable with the previous EGRET upper limit (<2.18 × 10−8 photons cm−2 s−1, 2σ), thus there is no evidence for a significant MeV/GeV flare on decade timescales. Contemporaneous Chandra and Very Long Baseline Array data indicate low activity in the unresolved X-ray and radio core relative to previous observations, suggesting M87 is in a quiescent overall level over the first year of Fermi-LAT observations. The LAT γ-ray spectrum is modeled as synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission from the electron population producing the radio-to-X-ray emission in the core. The resultant SSC spectrum extrapolates smoothly from the LAT band to the historical-minimum TeV emission. Alternative models for the core and possible contributions from the kiloparsec-scale jet in M87 are considered, and cannot be excluded.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82efdd5c789bc91b2b214238fc9784c37001c07e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

THE FIRST CATALOG OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI DETECTED BY THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2010, background): “Abdo et al. (2009f) noted that, as the number of LAT detections increased, source confusion was likely to be more of a problem, and indeed, the 1LAC includes 35 LAT sources that are associated with more than one AGN (for a total of 73 such associations).”
FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF MISALIGNED ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI (2010, methodology): “Dedicated papers have been recently published or are in preparation on three of these, namely, NGC 1275 (Abdo et al. 2009b), M87 (Abdo et al. 2009c), and Cen A (Abdo et al. 2010c, 2010d).”
FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE VIEW OF THE CORE OF THE RADIO GALAXY CENTAURUS A (2010, methodology): “In the companion LAT Bright AGN169 Sample paper (LBAS; Abdo et al. 2009c) to the BSL, a single power-law fit was reported, which170 gave F (>100 MeV) = 2.15 (± 0.45) × 10−7 ph cm−2 s−1 with photon index, Γ = 2.91 ± 0.18,171 and a peak flux on a ∼1 week timescale of (3.23 ± 0.80) × 10−7 ph cm−2 s−1.”
BLAZARS AS ULTRA-HIGH-ENERGY COSMIC-RAY SOURCES: IMPLICATIONS FOR TeV GAMMA-RAY OBSERVATIONS (2011, background): “Cen A (Abdo et al. 2010d), M87 (Abdo et al. 2009c), and NGC 1275 (Abdo et al. 2009b; Kataoka et al. 2010; Brown & Adams 2011) have also been detected at GeV energies.”
THE THIRD CATALOG OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI DETECTED BY THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2015, methodology): “M 87 was one of the first new Fermi-LAT detections (Abdo et al. 2009d) of a source classified as a non-blazar object, being a low-power Fanaroff & Riley (1974) type-I (FRI) radio galaxy.”
Constraints on dark matter annihilation in clusters of galaxies with the Fermi large area telescope (2010, unknown): “Significant gamma-ray emission has not been detected from local clusters by FermiLAT in the first 11 months of observations [10], aside from the detection of the central radio galaxies in a couple of clusters [11, 12].”
General relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of the jet in M 87 (2015, background): “3, we also plot the observational data points from Abdo et al. (2009) and Doeleman et al. (2012).”
CONTRIBUTION OF GAMMA-RAY-LOUD RADIO GALAXIES’ CORE EMISSIONS TO THE COSMIC MeV AND GeV GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND RADIATION (2011, methodology): “The viewing angle of NGC 1275, M 87, and Cen A is derived as 25◦, 10◦, and 30◦ by SED fitting (Abdo et al. 2009b, 2009c, 2010c), respectively.”
FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE FIRST SOURCE CATALOG (2010, methodology): “7−7037 which is also associated with PKS 0601−70, a blazar that was significantly variable during the time span of the 1FGL catalog (Abdo et al. 2009f).”