Fermi LAT detection of a GeV flare from PKS 1124-186
ATel #3207; A. Allafort (SLAC/KIPAC), on behalf of the Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration
on 4 Mar 2011; 18:22 UT
Credential Certification: Rolf Buehler (buehler@slac.stanford.edu)
Subjects: >GeV, AGN, Blazar, Quasar
The Large Area Telescope (LAT), one of the two instruments on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, has observed an increasing gamma-ray flux from a source positionally consistent with the flat spectrum radio quasar PKS 1124-186, also known as CGRaBS J1127-1857 and 1FGL J1126.8-1854 (RA=11h27m04.3924s, DEC=-18d57m17.440s, J2000; Johnston et al. 1995, AJ, 110, 880). The source is located at redshift z=1.048 (Drinkwater et al. 1997, MNRAS, 284, 85).
Preliminary analysis indicates that on March 2, 2011 the source reached a daily gamma-ray flux (E>100MeV) of (0.9 +/- 0.2) x10^-6 ph cm^-2 s^-1 (error is statistical only). This value represents an increase of a factor of ~12 with respect to the flux in the 1FGL catalog (Abdo et al. 2010, ApJS, 188, 405), which reports the average flux from August 2008 through June 2009.
Because Fermi operates in an all-sky scanning mode, regular gamma-ray monitoring of this source will continue. In light of the ongoing activity of this source, we encourage multiwavelength observations. For this source the Fermi LAT contact person is Alice Allafort (allafort@stanford.edu).
The Fermi LAT is a pair conversion telescope designed to cover the energy band from 20 MeV to greater than 300 GeV. It is the product of an international collaboration between NASA and DOE in the U.S. and many scientific institutions across France, Italy, Japan and Sweden.
