2020/12/12 by Alberto Rosales de León, A. Rosales de León, A. M. Brown +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Active galactic nucleus #Akaike information criterion #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Blazar #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope #Flare #Galaxy #Gamma ray #Neutrino #Neutrino Physics Research #Nuclear physics #Photon #Physics #Sky #Statistics #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/staa3839
published as MNRAS, 501 (2), pp. 2198-2208 (2021) · Published in MNRAS. 11 pages, 3 figures
openalex publication_date 2020/12/12 · arxiv created 2021/01/05 · arxiv updated 2021/01/07 · openalex created_date 2021/01/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
ABSTRACT Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that have a relativistic jet with a small viewing angle towards the observer. Recent results based on hadronic scenarios have motivated an ongoing discussion of how a blazar can produce high energy neutrinos during a flaring state and which scenario can successfully describe the observed gamma-ray behaviour. Markarian 421 is one of the closest and brightest objects in the extragalactic gamma-ray sky and showed flaring activity over a 14-days period in 2010 March. In this work, we describe the performed analysis of Fermi-LAT data from the source focused on the MeV range (100 MeV–1 GeV), and study the possibility of a contribution coming from the pγ interactions between protons and MeV SSC target photons to fit the very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission. The fit results were compared with two leptonic models (one-zone and two-zone) using the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) test, which evaluates goodness-of-fit alongside the simplicity of the model. In all cases, the photohadronic model was favoured as a better fit description in comparison to the one-zone leptonic model, and with respect to the two-zone model in the majority of cases. Our results show the potential of a photohadronic contribution to a lepto-hadronic origin of gamma-ray flux of blazars. Future gamma-ray observations above tens of TeV and below 100 MeV in energy will be crucial to test and discriminate between models.