Issue |
A&A
Volume 690, October 2024
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A223 | |
Number of page(s) | 7 | |
Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202449888 | |
Published online | 10 October 2024 |
Rapid optical flare in the extreme teraelectronvolt blazar 1ES 0229+200 on intraday timescales with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
1
Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES), Manora Peak, Nainital 263001, India
e-mail: amp700151@gmail.com; acgupta30@gmail.come-mail: wiitap@tcnj.edu
2
Department of Physics, DDU Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur 273009, India
3
Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), 150 Science-1 Street, Urumqi 830011, PR China
4
Department of Physics, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Rd., Ewing, NJ 08628-0718, USA
e-mail: wiitap@tcnj.edu
Received:
7
March
2024
Accepted:
27
April
2024
Context. The extreme teraelectronvolt (TeV) blazar 1ES 0229+200 is a high-frequency-peaked BL Lacertae object. It has not shown intraday variability in extensive optical and X-ray observations, nor has it shown any significant variability on any measurable timescale in the 1–100 GeV energy range over a 14-year span; however, variations in the source flux around its average are present in the energy range above 200 GeV.
Aims. We aim to search for intraday optical variability in 1ES 0229+200 as part of an ongoing project to search for variability and quasi-periodic oscillations in the high-cadence (2 min), nearly uniformly sampled optical light curves of blazars provided by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
Methods. 1ES 0229+200 was monitored by TESS in its Sectors 42, 43, and 44. We analysed the data of all these three sectors both with the TESS-provided lightkurve software and the eleanor reduction pipeline. We detected a strong, essentially symmetric flare that lasted about 6 h in Sector 42. We fitted the flare’s rising and declining phases to exponential functions. We also analysed the light curve of Sector 42 using the Lomb-Scargle periodogram (LSP) and continuous auto-regressive moving average (CARMA) methods.
Results. The optical light curve of Sector 42 of the TESS observations displayed in the present work provides the first evidence of a strong, rapid, short-lived optical flare on the intraday timescale in the TeV blazar 1ES 0229+200. The variability timescale of the flare provides the upper limit for the size of the emission region to be within (3.3 ± 0.2–8.3 ± 0.5)×1015 cm. Away from the flare, the slope of the periodogram’s power spectrum is fairly typical of many blazars (α < 2), but the nominal slopes for the flaring regions are very steep (α ∼ 4.3), which may indicate that the electron distribution undergoes a sudden change. We discuss possible emission mechanisms that could explain this substantial and rapid flare.
Key words: galaxies: active / BL Lacertae objects: general / BL Lacertae objects: individual: 1ES 0229+200 / galaxies: jets
© The Authors 2024
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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