VERITAS Long-Term Observations of Hard Spectrum Blazars

Abstract

The VERITAS collaboration has approved long-term observations on several distant, hard-spectrum blazars. We present first results from VERITAS long-term observations of 1ES1218+304, 1ES0229+200, and 1ES0414+009. Gamma-ray observations of distant, hard-spectrum blazars has emerged as an effective, indirect probe of the universe's diffuse extragalactic background light (EBL), due to the extinction of gamma-rays via the pair production interaction ${\gamma }_{TeV}{\gamma }_{EBL}\to e^{+}{e}^{-}$, which is expected to produce absorption features in distant gamma-ray sources. The sources presented here emit spectra that are well fit by power laws.

ICRC proceedings paper, 4 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (1)

• The VERITAS Upgraded Telescope-Level Trigger Systems: Technical Details and Performance Characterization

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Unravelling the complex behavior of Mrk 421 with simultaneous X-ray and VHE observations during an extreme flaring activity in April 2013
• TeV-peaked candidate BL Lac objects
• Constraints on the extragalactic magnetic field strength from blazar spectra based on 145 months of Fermi-LAT observations