FERMIGAMMA-RAY SPACE TELESCOPE OBSERVATIONS OF THE GAMMA-RAY OUTBURST FROM 3C454.3 IN NOVEMBER 2010

By A. Abdo, M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, A. Allafort, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, R. Bellazzini, B. Berenji and 143 more. 2011

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The flat-spectrum radio quasar 3C454.3 underwent an extraordinary 5 day γ-ray outburst in 2010 November when the daily flux measured with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) at photon energies E > 100 MeV reached (66 ± 2) × 10−6 photons cm−2 s−1. This is a factor of three higher than its previous maximum flux recorded in 2009 December and ≳ 5 times brighter than the Vela pulsar, which is normally the brightest source in the γ-ray sky. The 3 hr peak flux was (85 ± 5)×10−6 photons cm−2 s−1, corresponding to an apparent isotropic luminosity of (2.1 ± 0.2)×1050 erg s−1, the highest ever recorded for a blazar. In this Letter, we investigate the features of this exceptional event in the γ-ray band of the Fermi-LAT. In contrast to previous flares of the same source observed with the Fermi-LAT, clear spectral changes are observed during the flare.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8645684a78406ce502e7b5bfc314da0472652e4a

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Citations in the corpus

A method for the estimation of the significance of cross-correlations in unevenly sampled red-noise time series (2014, background): “For example, variability can be used to set limits on the sizes of the emitting regions through causality arguments (e.g. Abdo et al. 2011), to determine the size of the broad-line region in active galactic nuclei (e.g. Peterson & Cota 1988) or to detect extrasolar planets (e.g. Charbonneau et al.…”
TURBULENT, EXTREME MULTI-ZONE MODEL FOR SIMULATING FLUX AND POLARIZATION VARIABILITY IN BLAZARS (2013, background): “Statistical analyses of the flux variations — in particular, the power-law power spectra (Chatterjee et al. 2008, 2009, 2012; Abdo et al. 2011) — imply that the variations are governed by noise processes with higher amplitudes on longer time-scales.”
Non-thermal particle acceleration in collisionless relativistic electron-proton reconnection (2016, background): “In addition to the distributed, and relatively steady, blazar emission discussed above, blazars often exhibit intense, rapid flares in gamma rays (Abdo et al. 2010, 2011; Aharonian et al. 2007).”
THE THIRD CATALOG OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI DETECTED BY THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2015, background): “The break energy obtained from a broken power-law fit has been found to be remarkably constant as a function of flux, at least for 3C 454.3 (Abdo et al. 2011).”
Kinematics of Parsec-scale Jets of Gamma-Ray Blazars at 43 GHz within the VLBA-BU-BLAZAR Program (2017, background): “…of the core was observed during the multi-wavelength outbursts in 2010 Spring and Autumn, with the maximum intrinsic brightness temperature of the core, Tb,int=1.65×1012, derived on 2010 October 24, which coincides with the start of the most prominent γ-ray outburst in 3C 454.3 (Abdo et al. 2011).”
MINUTE-TIMESCALE >100 MeV γ-RAY VARIABILITY DURING THE GIANT OUTBURST OF QUASAR 3C 279 OBSERVED BY FERMI-LAT IN 2015 JUNE (2016, background): “Moreover, this is only the second case when such timescales are reported for an FSRQ blazar, after PKS 1222+216 (Aleksić et al. 2011), while Fermi-LAT had only ever detected variability as short as hour timescal in some FSRQs (e.g.,Abdo et al. 2011a; Saito et al. 2013; Hayashida et al. 2015).”
THE FIRST FERMI-LAT CATALOG OF SOURCES ABOVE 10 GeV (2013, methodology): “However, detection of 3C 454.3 would have been more difficult due to its strong spectral break at GeV energies, even during large flares (see Ackermann et al. 2010; Abdo et al. 2011a) and the greater redshift (z = 0.859) of this source.”