MAGIC detection of renewed activity from the radio galaxy IC 310
ATel #4583; Juan Cortina for the MAGIC collaboration
on 16 Nov 2012; 19:17 UT
Credential Certification: Juan Cortina (cortina@ifae.es)
Subjects: Gamma Ray, TeV, VHE, Request for Observations, AGN
The MAGIC telescopes have observed a high VHE (E>~100 GeV) gamma-ray flux from the galaxy IC 310. The object (RA: 03h 16m 43.0s, Dec: +41d 19m 29s, J2000) is a TeV radio-loud galaxy located in the Perseus Cluster of galaxies at redshift 0.0189 (Falco et al. 1999). Although formerly considered to be an archetypical head-tail galaxy, recent radio-interferometric observations have shown that IC 310 hosts a blazar-type central engine (Kadler et al. 2012, A&A, 538, L1). The source was discovered as a VHE emitter by MAGIC in the 2009-2010 campaign, showing a mean flux level of (2.5 +- 0.4)% of the Crab Nebula flux above 300 GeV (J. Aleksic et al. (MAGIC Coll.), Astrophys. J. 723(2010) L207).
MAGIC observations were carried out on November 12, 2012 (MJD 56243.9 - 56244.1) right after the upgrade of the MAGIC telescopes has been completed. Preliminary analysis resulted in a detection with the significance of 25 standard deviations. The mean flux above 300 GeV is higher than 50% of the Crab Nebula flux which is the highest ever detected from IC 310 in the VHE range. MAGIC will continue to observe the source and multi-frequency observations are strongly encouraged.
The MAGIC contact person is J. Cortina (cortina@ifae.es). For the multiwavelength campaign the contact person is D. Eisenacher (deisenacher@astro.uni-wuerzburg.de).
