Detection of the cosmic \gamma-ray horizon from multiwavelength observations of blazars

TL;DR

This paper reports the first statistically significant, model-independent detection of the cosmic gamma-ray horizon using multiwavelength observations of blazars, providing new insights into the universe's opacity to high-energy gamma rays.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, EBL-model independent method to estimate the cosmic gamma-ray horizon through synchrotron/SSC modeling of blazar spectra and comparison with VHE observations.

Findings

The observed CGRH aligns with existing EBL models.

The method provides a new way to measure universe opacity to gamma rays.

Supports current understanding of EBL and gamma-ray propagation.

Abstract

The first statistically significant detection of the cosmic \gamma-ray horizon (CGRH) that is independent of any extragalactic background light (EBL) model is presented. The CGRH is a fundamental quantity in cosmology. It gives an estimate of the opacity of the Universe to very high energy (VHE) \gamma-ray photons due to photon-photon pair production with the EBL. The only estimations of the CGRH to date are predictions from EBL models and lower limits from \gamma-ray observations of cosmological blazars and \gamma-ray bursts. Here, we present homogeneous synchrotron/synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) models of the spectral energy distributions of 15 blazars based on (almost) simultaneous observations from radio up to the highest energy \gamma-rays taken with the Fermi satellite. These synchrotron/SSC models predict the unattenuated VHE fluxes, which are compared with the observations by imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. This comparison provides an estimate of the optical depth of the EBL, which allows a derivation of the CGRH through a maximum likelihood analysis that is EBL-model independent. We find that the observed CGRH is compatible with the current knowledge of the EBL.