Fermi LAT Detection of a Bright GeV Flare from the FSRQ PKS 1441+25
ATel #6878; Roopesh Ojha (NASA/GSFC/UMBC), on behalf of the Fermi Large Area Telescope Collaboration
on 5 Jan 2015; 23:57 UT
Credential Certification: Roopesh Ojha (Roopesh.Ojha@gmail.com)
Subjects: Gamma Ray, >GeV, AGN, Blazar, Quasar
The Large Area Telescope (LAT), one of the two instruments on the
Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, has observed increasing gamma-ray
flux from a source positionally consistent with the flat spectrum
radio quasar PKS 1441+25 (RA=14h43m56.8922s, Dec=+25d01m44.490s,
J2000; Fomalont et al. 2003, AJ, 126, 2562) at z= 0.939 (Shaw et
al. 2012, ApJ, 748, 49).
Preliminary analysis indicates that on Jan 3, 2015, the daily averaged
flux (E>100MeV) was (0.7 +/- 0.2) x 10^-6 photons cm^-2 s^-1 (errors
are statistical only), which is the highest ever recorded for this
source and is about 70 times its average flux in the 2FGL catalog (2FGL
J1444.1+2500; Nolan et al. 2012, ApJS, 199, 31).
Because Fermi operates in an all-sky scanning mode, regular gamma-ray
monitoring of this source will continue. We encourage further
multifrequency observations of this source. For this source the Fermi
LAT contact person is Roopesh Ojha (Roopesh.Ojha@gmail.com).
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.
