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American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2(824), p. L20, 2016

DOI: 10.3847/2041-8205/824/2/l20

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MINUTE-TIMESCALE ≫100 MeV γ-Ray VARIABILITY During the GIANT OUTBURST of QUASAR 3C 279 OBSERVED by FERMI-LAT in 2015 June

Journal article published in 2016 by M. Ackermann ORCID, R. Anantua, K. Asano, L. Baldini, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, J. Becerra Gonzalez, R. Bellazzini, E. Bissaldi ORCID, R. D. Blandford, E. D. Bloom, R. Bonino ORCID, E. Bottacini, P. Bruel, R. Buehler and other authors.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Preprint: archiving forbidden
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Postprint: archiving forbidden
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Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter. --Corresponding authors: Masaaki Hayashida (mahaya_at_icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp), Greg Madejski (madejski_at_slac.stanford.edu), and Krzysztof Nalewajko (knalew_at_camk.edu.pl) ; International audience ; On 2015 June 16, Fermi-LAT observed a giant outburst from the flat spectrum radio quasar 3C 279 with a peak $>100$ MeV flux of $∼3.6\times10^{-5}\;{\rm photons}\;{\rm cm}^{-2}\;{\rm s}^{-1}$ averaged over orbital period intervals. It is the historically highest $γ$-ray flux observed from the source including past EGRET observations, with the $γ$-ray isotropic luminosity reaching $∼10^{49}\;{\rm erg}\;{\rm s}^{-1}$. During the outburst, the Fermi spacecraft, which has an orbital period of 95.4 min, was operated in a special pointing mode to optimize the exposure for 3C 279. For the first time, significant flux variability at sub-orbital timescales was found in blazar observations by Fermi-LAT. The source flux variability was resolved down to 2-min binned timescales, with flux doubling times less than 5 min. The observed minute-scale variability suggests a very compact emission region at hundreds of Schwarzschild radii from the central engine in conical jet models. A minimum bulk jet Lorentz factor ($Γ$) of 35 is necessary to avoid both internal $γ$-ray absorption and super-Eddington jet power. In the standard external-radiation-Comptonization scenario, $Γ$ should be at least 50 to avoid overproducing the synchrotron-self-Compton component. However, this predicts extremely low magnetization ($∼5\times10^{-4}$). Equipartition requires $Γ$ as high as 120, unless the emitting region is a small fraction of the dissipation region. Alternatively, we consider $γ$ rays originating as synchrotron radiation of $γ_{\rm e}∼1.6\times10^6$ electrons, in magnetic field $B∼1.3$ kG, accelerated by strong electric fields $E∼ B$ in the process of magnetoluminescence. At such short distance scales, one cannot immediately exclude production of $γ$ rays in hadronic processes.