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| LST-1 Discovers the Most Distant AGN at Very High Energies | On 15 December, the Large-Sized Telescope (LST) Collaboration announced through an Astronomer’s Telegram (ATel) the detection of the source OP 313 at very high energies with the LST-1. | 2023-12-26 | news | CTAO | /uploads/LST1_MW-768x432.png | false |
La Palma, Spain – On 15 December, the Large-Sized Telescope (LST) Collaboration announced through an Astronomer’s Telegram (ATel) the detection of the source OP 313 at very high energies with the LST-1. Although OP 313 was known at lower energies, it had never been detected above 100 GeV, making this the LST-1’s first scientific discovery. With these results, OP 313 becomes the most distant Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) ever detected by a Cherenkov telescope, further showcasing the LST prototype’s exceptional performance while it is being commissioned on the CTAO-North site on the island of La Palma, Spain.
Read the ATel issued by the LST Collaboration.
OP 313 is what is known as a Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar or FSRQ, a type of AGN. These are very luminous objects found in the centres of some galaxies, where a supermassive black hole devours material from its surroundings, creating powerful accretion disks and jets of light and relativistic particles.
The LST-1 observed this source between December 10 and 14, after receiving an alert from the Fermi-LAT satellite that showed unusually high activity in the low-energy gamma-ray regime, confirmed also in the optical range with different instruments. With just four days of data, the LST Collaboration was able to detect the source above 100 Gigaelectronvolts (GeV), an energy level a billion times higher than the visible light humans can perceive.
Only nine quasars are known at very high energies, and OP 313 is now the tenth. In general, quasars are more difficult to detect at very high energies than other types of AGN. This is not only because the brightness of their accretion disk weakens the emission of gamma rays, but because they are further away. In this case, OP 313 is located at a redshift of 0.997 or ~8 billion light years away, making it the most distant AGN and the second most distant source ever detected at very high energies.
The more distant the source, the more difficult it is to observe at very high energies due to the so-called Extragalactic Background Light or EBL. The EBL is the collective light emitted by all objects outside the Milky Way that expands across multiple wavelengths, from visible, infrared and ultraviolet. The EBL interacts with very high-energy gamma rays, attenuating their flux and, thus, making their observation challenging. The characteristics of the LST-1, with an optimized sensitivity for the CTAO’s low energy range, between 20 and 150 GeV, where gamma rays are less affected by the EBL, enabled the LST Collaboration to extend the study of this source to tens of GeV for the first time.
The LST Collaboration will continue to observe this source with the LST-1 to expand the dataset and, thus, obtain a more precise analysis that allows scientists to improve their understanding of the EBL, study the magnetic fields within this type of source or delve into fundamental intergalactic physics.
About the LST
The Large-Sized Telescope (LST) is one of three types of telescope that will be built to cover CTAO’s full energy range (20 GeV to 300 TeV). The approved Alpha Configuration of the CTAO includes four LSTs arranged at the centre of the northern hemisphere array. An enhancement plan of such layout includes also two LSTs in the southern array, which are funded. These telescopes are optimized to cover the low-energy sensitivity between 20 and 150 GeV. Each LST is a giant 23 metre diameter telescope with a mirror area of about 400 square metres and a fine pixelized camera made of 1855 light sensors capable of detecting individual photons with high efficiency. Although the LST stands 45 metres tall and weighs around 100 tonnes, it is extremely nimble, with the ability to reposition within 20 seconds to capture brief, low-energy gamma-ray signals. Both the fast repositioning speed and the low energy threshold provided by the LSTs are critical for CTAO’s studies of transient gamma-ray sources in our own Galaxy and for the study of active galactic nuclei and gamma-ray bursts at high redshift. The prototype of the LST, the LST-1, is located at CTAO-North and is currently under commissioning. It is expected to become the first CTAO telescope once its commissioning is complete and it has been officially accepted.
About the LST Collaboration
The LST Collaboration is made up of over 400 scientists and engineers from 67 different institutions across twelve countries. The telescope operations and maintenance as well as the data-taking, analysis, and technical and scientific publications are only made possible with the collaborative effort of the entire LST Collaboration members from the following list of institutes:
Brazil
Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas
Bulgaria
Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Croatia
Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Department of Physics
University of Rijeka, Department of Physics
University of Split, FESB
Czech Republic
Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Charles University, Institute of Particle and Nuclear Physics
FZU – Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences
Palacky University Olomouc, Faculty of Science
France
Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS/IN2P3, CPPM
LAPP, Univ. Savoie Mont Blanc, CNRS-IN2P3
Germany
Department of Physics, TU Dortmund University
Institut für Theoretische Physik, Lehrstuhl IV: Plasma-Astroteilchenphysik, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Institute for Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, Universität Würzburg
Max-Planck-Institut für Physik
Universität Hamburg, Institut für Experimentalphysik
India (dormant)
Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics
Italy
Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica ‘E. Segrè’ Università degli Studi di Palermo
INAF
INFN and Università degli Studi di Siena, Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche, della Terra e dell’Ambiente (DSFTA)
INFN Dipartimento di Scienze Fisiche e Chimiche – Università degli Studi dell’Aquila and Gran Sasso Science Institute
INFN Sezione di Bari and Politecnico di Bari
INFN Sezione di Bari and Università di Bari
INFN Sezione di Catania
INFN Sezione di Napoli
INFN Sezione di Padova and Università degli Studi di Padova
INFN Sezione di Pisa
INFN Sezione di Roma La Sapienza
INFN Sezione di Roma Tor Vergata
INFN Sezione di Trieste and Università degli Studi di Trieste
INFN Sezione di Trieste and Università degli Studi di Udine
University of Torino and INFN Sezione di Torino
Japan
Chiba University
Department of Earth and Space Science, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University
Department of Physical Sciences, Aoyama Gakuin University
Department of Physics, Konan University
Department of Physics, Tokai University
Department of Physics, Yamagata University
Division of Physics and Astronomy, Graduate School of Science, Kyoto University
Faculty of Science and Engineering, Waseda University
Faculty of Science, Ibaraki University
Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Saitama University
Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo
Graduate School of Technology, Industrial and Social Sciences, Tokushima University
Hiroshima Astrophysical Science Center, Hiroshima University
Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo
Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University
Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, KEK (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization)
Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute (KMI) for the Origin of Particles and the Universe, Nagoya University
Physics Program, Graduate School of Advanced Science and Engineering, Hiroshima University
RIKEN, Institute of Physical and Chemical Research
School of Allied Health Sciences, Kitasato University
Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University
Poland
Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics, University of Lodz
Spain
CIEMAT
Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica, Institut de Ciències del Cosmos, Universitat de Barcelona, IEEC-UB
EMFTEL department and IPARCOS, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Escuela Politécnica Superior de Jaén, Universidad de Jaén
Grupo de Electronica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Institut de Fisica d’Altes Energies (IFAE), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology
Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC), and Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC), and Institució Catalana de Recerca I Estudis Avançats (ICREA)
Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía-CSIC
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias and Departamento de Astrofísica, Universidad de La Laguna
Port d’Informació Científica
University of Alcalá UAH
Switzerland
Department of Astronomy, University of Geneva
Laboratory for High Energy Physics, École Polytechnique Fédérale
University of Geneva – Département de physique nucléaire et corpusculaire
About the CTAO
The Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) will be the first open ground-based gamma-ray observatory and the world’s largest and most sensitive instrument for the exploration of the high-energy Universe. The CTAO’s unparalleled accuracy and broad energy range (20 GeV- 300 TeV) will provide novel insights into the most extreme and powerful events in the Cosmos, addressing questions in and beyond astrophysics falling under three major themes: Understanding the origin and role of relativistic cosmic particles, probing extreme environments (such as black holes and neutron stars) and exploring frontiers in physics (such as the nature of dark matter). To do so, the CTAO will use three types of telescopes: the Large-Sized Telescopes (LST), the Medium-Sized Telescopes (MST) and the Small-Sized Telescopes (SST). More than 60 telescopes will be distributed between two telescope array sites: CTAO-North in the northern hemisphere at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias’s (IAC’s) Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma (Spain), and CTAO-South in the southern hemisphere near the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert (Chile). The headquarters of the CTAO is hosted by the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Bologna (Italy), and the Science Data Management Centre (SDMC) is hosted by the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Zeuthen (Germany). The CTAO will also be the first observatory of its kind to be open to the worldwide scientific communities as a resource for data from unique, high-energy astronomical observations.
The CTAO Central Organisation works in close cooperation with partners from around the world toward the development of the Observatory. Major partners include In-Kind Contribution teams, such as the Telescope teams that are developing essential hardware and software, in addition to the CTAC, an international group of researchers who have provided scientific guidance since the project’s inception.
The CTAO was promoted to a “Landmark” on the European Forum on Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) Roadmap 2018, and was ranked as the main priority among the new ground-based infrastructures in the ASTRONET Roadmap 2022-2035.
Contact
Prof. Masahiro Teshima
LST Principle Investigator (PI)
(English, Japanese)
LST Outreach Team
lst-outreach@cta-observatory.org
(English)
Dr. Alba Fernández-Barral
CTAO Chief Communication Officer
alba.fernandezbarral@cta-observatory.org
+39-051-6357-270
(English, Spanish and Italian)