Issue |
A&A
Volume 574, February 2015
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A88 | |
Number of page(s) | 5 | |
Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201425114 | |
Published online | 29 January 2015 |
On the gamma-ray emission from 3C 120
1 ICRANet, Piazza della Repubblica 10, 65122 Pescara, Italy
e-mail: narek@icra.it
2 ICRANet-Yerevan, Marshall Baghramian Avenue 24a, 0019 Yerevan, Republic of Armenia
Received: 6 October 2014
Accepted: 11 December 2014
We report the analysis of Fermi Large Area Telescope data from five years of observations of the broad line radio galaxy 3C 120. The accumulation of a larger data set results in the detection of high energy γ-rays up to 10 GeV, with a detection significance of about 8.7σ. A power law spectrum with a photon index of 2.72 ± 0.1 and an integrated flux of Fγ = (2.35 ± 0.5) × 10-8photoncm-2 s-1 above 100 MeV well describe the data averaged over five years of observations. The variability analysis of the light curve with 180, and 365 day bins reveals flux increase (nearly twice its average level) during the last year of observation. This variability on month timescales indicates the compactness of the emitting region. The γ-ray spectrum can be described as synchrotron self-Compton emission from the electron population producing the radio-to-X-ray emission in the jet. The required electron energy density exceeds the magnetic field energy density only by a factor of 2, meaning there is no significant deviation from equipartition.
Key words: galaxies: individual: 3C 120 / gamma rays: galaxies / radiation mechanisms: non-thermal
© ESO, 2015
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