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MAGIC detection of sub-TEV emission from gravitationally lensed blazar QSO B0218+357

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2017

D. Dominis Prester
Affiliation:
University of Rijeka, Department of Physics, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia, email: dijana@phy.uniri.hr
J. Sitarek
Affiliation:
University of Łódź, PL-90236 Lodz, Poland
J. Becerra
Affiliation:
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, MD 20742, USA
S. Buson
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, MD 20742, USA Università di Padova and INFN, I-35131 Padova, Italy
E. Lindfors
Affiliation:
Tuorla Observatory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, Finland
M. Manganaro
Affiliation:
IAC, E-38200 La Laguna; Universidad de La Laguna, Dpto. Astrofísica, E-38206 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain
D. Mazin
Affiliation:
ICRR, The University of Tokyo, 277-8582 Chiba, Japan
M. Nievas Rosillo
Affiliation:
Universidad Complutense, E-28040 Madrid, Spain
K. Nilsson
Affiliation:
Tuorla Observatory, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Turku, Finland
A. Stamerra
Affiliation:
INAF Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, I-10025 Pino Torinese, Italy
F. Tavecchio
Affiliation:
INAF National Institute for Astrophysics, I-00136 Rome, Italy
Ie. Vovk
Affiliation:
http://wwwmagic.mppmu.mpg.de
for the MAGIC Coll.
Affiliation:
http://wwwmagic.mppmu.mpg.de
the Fermi-LAT Coll.
Affiliation:
http://fermi.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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The blazar QSO B0218+357 is the first gravitationally lensed blazar detected in the very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) gamma-ray spectral range (Ahnen et al. 2016). It is gravitationally lensed by the intervening galaxy B0218+357G (zl = 0.68466 ± 0.00004, Carilli et al. 1993), which splits the blazar emission into two components, spatially indistinguishable by gamma-ray instruments, but separated by a 10-12 days delay. In July 2014 a flare from QSO B0218+357 was observed by the Fermi-LAT (Large Area Telescope, Atwood et al. 2009, Ackermann et al. 2012), and followed-up by the MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov) telescopes, a stereoscopic system of two 17m Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes located on La Palma, Canary Islands (Aleksić et al. 2016a, 2016b), during the expected time of arrival of the delayed component of the emission. MAGIC could not observe the leading image due to the Full Moon. The MAGIC and Fermi-LAT observations were accompanied by optical data from KVA telescope at La Palma, and X-ray observations by Swift-XRT (Fig. 1 left). Variability in gamma-rays was of the order of one day, while no variability correlated with gamma-rays was observed at lower energies. The flux ratio of the leading to trailing image in HE gamma-rays was larger than in the flare of QSO B0218+357 observed by Fermi-LAT in 2012 (Cheung et al. 2014). Changes in the observed flux ratio can be caused by gravitational microlensing on individual stars in the host galaxy (Neronov et al. 2015), or by other compact objects like for ex. clumps in giant molecular clouds (Sitarek & Bednarek 2016).

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2017 

References

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