Suborbital Fermi/LAT Analysis of the Brightest Gamma-Ray Flare of Blazar 3C 454.3

TL;DR

This study analyzes Fermi/LAT data of blazar 3C 454.3's brightest gamma-ray flare, revealing flux variations only over timescales longer than 5 hours, supporting existing blazar emission models.

Contribution

It provides the first suborbital analysis of 3C 454.3's gamma-ray variability with high time resolution, testing flux stability at minute scales.

Findings

Flux variations occur only over timescales longer than 5 hours.

Short-term flux variations are not statistically significant.

Results support standard blazar emission models.

Abstract

Recent detection of suborbital gamma-ray variability of Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar (FSRQ) 3C 279 by Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) is in severe conflict with established models of blazar emission. This paper presents the results of suborbital analysis of the Fermi/LAT data for the brightest gamma-ray flare of another FSRQ blazar 3C 454.3 in November 2010 (MJD 55516-22). Gamma-ray light curves are calculated for characteristic time bin lengths as short as 3 min. The measured variations of the 0.1-10 GeV photon flux are tested against the hypothesis of steady intraorbit flux. In addition, the structure function is calculated for absolute photon flux differences and for their significances. Significant gamma-ray flux variations are measured only over time scales longer than ~5h, which is consistent with the standard blazar models.