Temporal and spectral study of PKS 0208-512 during the 2019-2020 flare

TL;DR

This study analyzes the temporal and spectral behavior of blazar PKS 0208-512 during a 2019-2020 flare, revealing insights into emission mechanisms, physical parameters, and the location of the emission region relative to the broad-line region.

Contribution

It provides detailed temporal and spectral analysis of PKS 0208-512 during a flare, modeling the SED to infer emission mechanisms and the emission region's proximity to the broad-line region.

Findings

Flux-doubling time of about 2 days during sub-flares

Double-lognormal flux distribution observed in gamma-ray lightcurve

Emission region is near the edge of the broad-line region during flares

Abstract

We present the temporal and spectral study of blazar PKS 0208-512, using recent flaring activity from November 2019 to May 2020, as detected by the Fermi-LAT observatory. The contemporaneous X-ray, optical/UV observations from Swift-XRT/UVOT are also used. During the activity state, 2-days binned ${\gamma}$-ray lightcurve shows multiple peaks indicating sub-flares. To understand the possible physical mechanisms behind flux enhancement, we divided the activity state of the source into several flux-states and carried out detailed temporal and spectral studies. Timing analysis of lightcurves suggest that peaks of sub-flares have rise and decay time on the order of days, with flux-doubling time $\sim$ 2-days. The 2-days binned ${\gamma}$-ray lightcurve shows double-lognormal flux distribution. The broadband spectral-energy-distribution (SED) for three selected flux states can be well fitted under synchrotron, synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) and external-Compton (EC) emission mechanisms. We obtained the physical parameters of the jet by the SED modeling and their confidence intervals through ${\chi}^2$-statistics. Our SED modeling results suggest that during quiescent-state, ${\gamma}$-ray spectrum can be well explained by considering the EC-scattering of infra-red (IR) photons from dusty-torus. However, ${\gamma}$-ray spectra corresponding to flares demand additional target photons from broad-line-region (BLR) along with IR. These suggest that during flares, the emission-region is close to the edge of BLR, while for quiescent-state the emission-region is away from BLR. The best fit results suggest that marginal increase in magnetic-field during the flaring-episode can result in the flux enhancement. This is possibly associated with the efficiency of particle acceleration during flaring-states as compared to quiescent-state.