Detection of sub-TeV gamma-ray emission from the flaring blazar TXS 1515-273 with the MAGIC telescopes
ATel #12538; Razmik Mirzoyan (Max-Planck-Institute for Physics, Munich), on behalf of the MAGIC collaboration
on 28 Feb 2019; 22:14 UT
Credential Certification: Razmik Mirzoyan (Razmik.Mirzoyan@mpp.mpg.de)
Subjects: Gamma Ray, >GeV, TeV, VHE, AGN, Blazar
The MAGIC collaboration reports the first detection of very-high-energy (VHE; E>100 GeV) gamma-ray emission from the flaring blazar TXS1515-273 (RA=15 18 03.610, Dec= -27 31 31.40, J2000.0). The object was observed with the MAGIC telescopes for 1.9 hours on 2019/02/28 under moderate moonlight in the zenith distance range 55 - 60 deg. The preliminary real-time analysis of this data shows a detection of TXS1515-273 with a statistical significance more than 5 standard deviations.
The MAGIC observations were triggered by the flaring activity reported by Fermi-LAT from 2019/02/24 to 2019/02/25 (ATel#12532). Few hours before that ATel, a communication from Dave Thompson from the Fermi team alerted the MAGIC collaboration about this source.
The redshift of this source is uncertain, with an upper limit z<1.1, set by photometric methods (Kaur, A. et al. 2018; ApJ, 859, 80). The source was previously detected by Fermi-LAT in the 2FGL, 3FGL, 4FGL catalogs and in the 2FHL and 3FHL catalogs of hard sources (ATel#12532).
MAGIC observations on TXS 1515-273 will continue during the next nights and multi-wavelength observations are encouraged. The MAGIC contact persons for these observations are R. Mirzoyan (Razmik.Mirzoyan@mpp.mpg.de) and Giacomo Bonnoli (giacomo.bonnoli@unisi.it).
MAGIC is a system of two 17m-diameter Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes located at the Canary island of La Palma, Spain, and designed to perform gamma-ray astronomy in the energy range from 50 GeV to greater than 50 TeV.
