2026/07/16 by Atreya Acharyya, Avery Archer, Priyadarshini Bangale +72
#astro-ph.HE
We report the first observations of a long-duration very-high-energy (VHE; E > 100 GeV) flare from BL Lacertae (VER J2202+422), taken with the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS). On October 15, 2022, the Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected elevated GeV activity originating from this blazar. This triggered a multiwavelength campaign, which includes observations from VERITAS, Swift, NuSTAR, and select optical and radio observatories. VERITAS observed the source for a total of ∼ 9.8 hours between September 1, 2022 and December 1, 2022. An analysis of these data yields a ∼ 28 σ detection of the source. While previously observed VHE flares from BL Lacertae have lasted on time-scales of minutes to days, VERITAS continued to detect flaring activity from the source for over a month (∼ 40 days) after the original flaring activity was detected with Fermi-LAT. Broadband spectral modeling shows that a synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model with an external inverse-Compton (EC) component is preferred over a one-zone SSC model.