Very-High-Energy Gamma Rays from a Distant Quasar: How Transparent Is the Universe?

Abstract

The atmospheric Cherenkov gamma-ray telescope MAGIC, designed for a low-energy threshold, has detected very-high-energy gamma rays from a giant flare of the distant Quasi-Stellar Radio Source (in short: radio quasar) 3C 279, at a distance of more than 5 billion light-years (a redshift of 0.536). No quasar has been observed previously in very-high-energy gamma radiation, and this is also the most distant object detected emitting gamma rays above 50 gigaelectron volts. Since high-energy gamma rays may be stopped by interacting with the diffuse background light in the universe, the observations by MAGIC imply a low amount for such light, consistent with that known from galaxy counts.

9 pages, 6 figures, including Supporting Online Material

References in corpus (2)

• Discovery of Very High Energy gamma-rays from 1ES 1011+496 at z=0.212
• Upper Limits from HESS AGN Observations in 2005-2007

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• ANN-based energy reconstruction procedure for TACTIC gamma-ray telescope and its comparison with other conventional methods