Discovery of Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Emission from the distant FSRQ PKS 1441+25 with the MAGIC telescopes
ATel #7416; R. Mirzoyan (Max-Planck-Institute for Physics)
on 20 Apr 2015; 02:09 UT
Credential Certification: Masahiro Teshima (mteshima@mppmu.mpg.de)
Subjects: Gamma Ray, TeV, VHE, AGN, Blazar
The MAGIC collaboration reports the discovery of very high energy (VHE; E>100 GeV) gamma-ray emission from the FSRQ PKS 1441+25 (RA=14h43m56.9s DEC=+25d01m44s), located at redshift z=0.939 (Shaw et al. 2012, ApJ, 748, 49). The object was observed with the MAGIC telescopes for ~2 hours during the night 2015 April 17/18, and for ~4 hours during 18/19. A preliminary analysis of the data yields a detection with a statistical significance of more than 6 standard deviations for the night of April 17/18, and more than 11 standard deviations for 18/19. This is the first time a significant signal at VHE gamma rays has been seen from PKS 1441+25. The flux above 80 GeV is estimated to be about 8e-11 cm^-2 s^-1 (16% of Crab Nebula flux).
PKS 1441+25 has entered an exceptionally high state at optical, X-, and Gamma-ray frequencies (ATel #7402), which triggered the MAGIC observations. The Swift Follow-up observation from April 18/19 revealed that the high state in X-rays is continuing: http://www.swift.psu.edu/monitoring/source.php?source=PKS1441+25
MAGIC observations on PKS1441+25 will continue during the following nights, and multiwavelength observations are encouraged. The MAGIC contact persons for these observations are R. Mirzoyan (Razmik.Mirzoyan@mpp.mpg.de) and E. Lindfors (elilin@utu.fi). 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.
