Inviting an author to review:
Find an author and click ‘Invite to review selected article’ near their name.
Search for authorsSearch for similar articles
48
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    4
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Intrinsic VHE Gamma-ray spectra of Blazars as a probe for Extragalactic Background Light

      Preprint

      Read this article at

          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Very high energy (VHE) \(\gamma\)-rays above 10\('\)s of GeV energy, emitted from distant blazars, are attenuated by photons from the extragalactic background light (EBL). Unfortunately, neither the EBL nor the intrinsic blazar spectrum is accurately known to derive one quantity from the other. In this work we use a homogeneous one zone model involving synchrotron, synchrotron self Compton (SSC) and external Compton (EC) emission mechanisms to estimate the intrinsic VHE spectra of blazars. The model is applied on three VHE blazars, namely PKS2155-304, RGB J0710+591 and 3C279, for which simultaneous multi-wavelength data are available from various observations. The predicted values of the intrinsic VHE fluxes are then compared with the observations by imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes to determine the optical depth of VHE \(\gamma\)-rays. On comparing these optical depth values with those predicted by four different EBL models, we observe a somewhat pronounced systematic deviation for PKS2155-304 and 3C279 at higher energies, especially for the EBL model proposed by Finke et al.(2010). We attribute this deviation to be an outcome of either the failure of the extrapolation of blazar SED to VHE energies and/or due to various assumptions buried in the EBL models.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          10.1016/j.newast.2013.08.004
          1310.8386

          Cosmology & Extragalactic astrophysics,High energy astrophysical phenomena

          Comments

          Comment on this article