University of California, Santa Cruz | 2015 Dec 15
New observations from VERITAS and other telescopes advance understanding of blazars as cosmic accelerators and as beacons for gamma-ray cosmologyBlazar Bonanza - Credit: NASA Goddard[hr][/hr]Click to play embedded YouTube video.
A flare of very high-energy gamma rays emitted from a galaxy halfway across the universe has put new bounds on the amount of background light in the universe and given astrophysicists clues to how and where such gamma rays are produced.
The galaxy, known as PKS 1441+25, is a rare type of galaxy called a blazar, a tremendously bright beacon powered by a supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy. Blazars are intrinsically unsteady light sources and can sometimes emit flares ten to a hundred times brighter than their baseline emissions. A flare from PKS 1441+25 was detected in April 2015 and observed by a range of telescopes sensitive to different wavelengths, including the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) in Arizona. ...
VERITAS Detects Gamma Rays from Galaxy Halfway Across the Visible Universe
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics | 2015 Dec 15
NASA's Fermi Satellite Kicks Off a Blazar-detecting Bonanza
NASA | Goddard Space Flight Center | Fermi | 2015 Dec 15
Quasar Outburst Revises Understanding of Universe, Quasars
Washington University in St. Louis | 2015 Dec 15
Gamma Rays from the Quasar PKS 1441+25: Story of an Escape - A. U. Abeysekara et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 815(2):L22 (2015 Dec 20) DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/815/2/L22
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1512.04434 > 14 Dec 2015