VERITAS Long-Term Observations of Hard Spectrum Blazars

Arun S. Madhavan

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arXiv · 1307.7051

VERITAS Long-Term Observations of Hard Spectrum Blazars

Arun S. Madhavan

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Abstract

The VERITAS collaboration has approved long-term observations on several distant, hard-spectrum blazars. We present first results from VERITAS long-term observations of 1ES1218+304, 1ES0229+200, and 1ES0414+009. Gamma-ray observations of distant, hard-spectrum blazars has emerged as an effective, indirect probe of the universe's diffuse extragalactic background light (EBL), due to the extinction of gamma-rays via the pair production interaction $\gamma_{TeV}\gamma_{EBL}\rightarrow e^{+}e^{-}$, which is expected to produce absorption features in distant gamma-ray sources. The sources presented here emit spectra that are well fit by power laws.

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Arun S. Madhavan. 2013-07-26. VERITAS Long-Term Observations of Hard Spectrum Blazars. https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.7051

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