Multiwavelength Observations of Strong Flares from the TeV Blazar 1ES 1959+650

By H. Krawczynski, S. Hughes, D. Horan, F. Aharonian, M. Aller, H. Aller, P. Boltwood, J. Buckley, Paolo De Coppi, G. Fossati and 9 more. 2003

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Following the detection of strong TeV γ-ray flares from the BL Lac object 1ES 1959+650 with the Whipple 10 m Cerenkov telescope on 2002 May 16 and 17, we performed intensive target of opportunity radio, optical, X-ray, and TeV γ-ray observations from 2002 May 18 to August 14. Observations with the X-ray telescope Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer and the Whipple and HEGRA γ-ray telescopes revealed several strong flares, enabling us to sensitively test the X-ray-γ-ray flux correlation properties. Although the X-ray and γ-ray fluxes seemed to be correlated in general, we found an "orphan" γ-ray flare that was not accompanied by an X-ray flare. While we detected optical flux variability with the Boltwood and Abastumani observatories, the data did not give evidence for a correlation of the optical flux variability with the observed X-ray and γ-ray flares. Within statistical errors of about 0.03 Jy at 14.5 GHz and 0.05 Jy at 4.8 GHz, the radio fluxes measured with the University of Michigan Radio Astronomy Observatory stayed constant throughout the campaign; the mean values agreed well with the values measured on 2002 May 7 and June 7 at 4.9 and 15 GHz with the Very Large Array and at 4.8 GHz with archival flux measurements. After describing in detail the radio, optical, X-ray and γ-ray light curves, and spectral energy distributions (SEDs), we present initial modeling of the SED with a simple synchrotron self-Compton model. With the addition of another TeV blazar with good broadband data, we consider the set of all TeV blazars, to begin to look for a connection of the jet properties to the properties of the central accreting black hole thought to drive the jet. Remarkably, the temporal and spectral X-ray and γ-ray emission characteristics of TeV blazars are very similar, even though the mass estimates of their central black holes differ by up to 1 order of magnitude.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8d9fa39a19f9025129c9f744ff2d9d963b01c41

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. F. Tavecchio
2. G. Ghisellini
3. Bing Zhang
4. W. N. Brandt
5. Luigi Foschini
6. C. Dermer
7. Y. Kovalev
8. E. Orlando

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. F. Tavecchio
2. G. Ghisellini
3. C. Dermer
4. Luigi Foschini
5. L. Maraschi
6. E. Orlando
7. Y. Kovalev
8. M. Lister

Citations in the corpus

• Variable Very High Energy γ-Ray Emission from Markarian 501 (2007, background): “…the thick accretion disk (Bednarek 1993), or interactions inside the (dense) jet (Pohl & Schlieckeiser 2000). the dominant emission process in blazar jets (not always in its simplest one-zone realization, as required by e.g. ’orphan flares’: see Krawczynski et al (2004) and Gliozzi et al (2006)).”
• The extragalactic background light and the gamma-ray opacity of the universe (2012, background): “Additional complications arise from the fact that basic one-zone SSC models are not applicable for sources exhibiting ”orphan flares”, where only the TeV flux is enhanced while the synchrotron emission remains unchanged (Krawczynski et al., 2004).”
• A Multiwavelength View of the TeV Blazar Markarian 421: Correlated Variability, Flaring, and Spectral Evolution (2005, background): “4 in Krawczynski et al. 2004), including similar variation patterns in X-rays.”
• An X-Ray, Infrared, and Submillimeter Flare of Sagittarius A* (2007, methodology): “We can numerically compare the observed IR and X-ray flare emission to our spherical source model by adapting the publicly available synchrotron-SSC code of Krawczynski et al. (2004).”
• Extreme TeV blazars and the intergalactic magnetic field (2010, background): “4 exceptions are the so-called orphan flares (e.g. Krawczynski et al. 2004). c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS000, 000–000 Compton scatter the photons of the CMB producingγ–rays of energyǫ ≃ γ2hνCMB ≃ 2.8 kTCMB γ2 = 0.63E2TeV GeV.”
• INSIGHTS INTO THE HIGH-ENERGY γ-RAY EMISSION OF MARKARIAN 501 FROM EXTENSIVE MULTIFREQUENCY OBSERVATIONS IN THE FERMI ERA (2011, background): “However, the exact character of the correlation between the X-ray and TeV fluxes is known to vary from object to object, and from epoch to epoch in a given source, as widely discussed in, e.g., Krawczynski et al. (2004); B lażejowski et al. (2005); Gliozzi et al. (2006); Fossati et al. (2008).”
• Sensitivity of the high altitude water Cherenkov detector to sources of multi-TeV gamma rays (2013, neutral): “This is particularly interesting given the occurrence of so-called ‘‘orphan’’ flares in which the inverse-Compton emission from a blazar will flare without an accompanying flare in the synchrotron emission [38].”