Detection of flaring very-high-energy gamma-ray emission from NGC 1275 with the MAGIC telescopes

ATel #15820; Oscar Blanch (Institut de Fisica d'Altes Energies, IFAE-BIST), Mireia Nievas Rosillo (IAC, Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias), Axel Arbet-Engels (Max-Planck Institute for Physics), Cosimo Nigro (IFAE-BIST), Miguel Molero (IAC, Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias), on behalf of the MAGIC collaboration
on 21 Dec 2022; 23:32 UT
Credential Certification: Oscar Blanch (blanch@ifae.es)

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he MAGIC Collaboration reports the observation of flaring activity in the very-high-energy (VHE; E>100 GeV) gamma-ray emission from NGC 1275 (RA: 03:19:48.00, Dec: +41:30:42.00, J2000.0). The preliminary analysis of the MAGIC data taken on the night of 2022/12/20 to 2022/12/21 (MJD59933.9 to MJD59934.1, for a total observation time of about two hours) resulted in the detection of NGC 1275 with a statistical significance of more than 30 standard deviations, and indicates a flux comparable to that from the Crab nebula (similar to what has been reported by CTA LST Collaboration, ATel #15819). This implies an increase by a factor of a few tens of times with respect to the flux reported in 2010 by MAGIC (Aleksic et al. 2011) and a comparable flux to that detected by MAGIC during the remarkable flare December 2016 - January 2017 (Ansoldi et al. 2018).
NGC 1275, a. k. a. 3C 84 and 4FGL J0319.8+4130 in the latest Fermi-LAT catalog, is a Seyfert type 2 radio galaxy located in the Perseus cluster at a redshift of 0.017.
The MAGIC observations were self-triggered by a monitoring program which resulted in a significant detection of the source on the night of 2022/12/19 to 2022/12/20. The preliminary Swift analysis shows an unabsorbed flux of 2.55 (+0.22, -0.18) × 10^-9 erg cm-2 s-1, which is about 2.5 times higher than during the flare of December 2016 - January 2017 (Baghmanyan et al. 2017). These numbers are the result of an automatic analysis performed using the UKSSDC on-demand analysis services (Evans et al. 2020) MAGIC observations on NGC 1275 will continue during the next days, multiwavelength observations are encouraged. The MAGIC contact persons for these observations are O. Blanch (blanch@ifae.es) and Mireia Nievas Rosillo (mnievas@iac.es).
The preliminary analysis has been performed by Mireia Nievas Rosillo (mnievas@iac.es), Cosimo Nigro (cosimo.nigro@ifae.es), Miguel Molero (miguel.molero@iac.es), and Axel Arbet-Engels (aarbet@mpp.mpg.de).
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.