Monitoring of bright blazars with MAGIC telescope

TL;DR

This paper discusses the monitoring of bright blazars using the MAGIC telescope, highlighting observations of flux variability and correlations in TeV gamma-ray emissions from specific blazars since 2006.

Contribution

It presents systematic observations of bright blazars with MAGIC, providing new insights into their flux variability and emission correlations.

Findings

Detected strong flux variability in Mrk 421.

Observed high correlation between X-ray and TeV emissions.

Presented preliminary light curves for Mrk 501 and 1ES 1959+650.

Abstract

Blazars, a class of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) characterized by a close orientation of their relativistic outflows (jets) towards the line of sight, are a well established extragalactic TeV $\gamma$-ray emitters. Since 2006, three nearby and TeV bright blazars, Markarian (Mrk) 421, Mrk 501 and 1ES 1959+650, are regularly observed by the MAGIC telescope with single exposures of 30 to 60 minutes. The sensitivity of MAGIC allows to establish a flux level of 30% of the Crab flux for each such observation. In a case of Mrk 421 strong flux variability in different time scales and a high correlation between X-ray/TeV emissions have been observed. In addition, preliminary results on measured light curves from Mrk 501 and 1ES1959+650 in 2007/8 are shown.