We report the discovery of faint very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) gamma-ray emission from the radio galaxy Centaurus A in deep observations performed with the H.E.S.S. experiment. A signal with a statistical significance of 5.0 sigma is detected from the region including the radio core and the inner kpc jets. The integral flux above an energy threshold of ~250 GeV is measured to be 0.8% of the flux of the Crab Nebula and the spectrum can be described by a power law with a photon index of 2.7 +/- 0.5_stat +/- 0.2_sys. No significant flux variability is detected in the data set. The discovery of VHE gamma-ray emission from Centaurus A reveals particle acceleration in the source to >TeV energies and, together with M 87, establishes radio galaxies as a class of VHE emitters.
@article{arxiv.0904.2654,
title = {Discovery of VHE gamma-rays from Centaurus A},
author = {M. Raue and J. -P. Lenain and F. A. Aharonian and Y. Becherini and C. Boisson and A. -C. Clapson and L. Costamante and L. Gerard and C. Medina and M. de Naurois and M. Punch and F. Rieger and H. Sol and L. Stawarz and A. Zech},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0904.2654},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, submitted as proceeding to the 44th Recontre de Moriond "Very High Energy Phenomena in the Universe", contains an updated SED including the recent Fermi data