English

The redshift of the BL Lac object TXS 0506+056

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-03-14 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

The bright BL Lac object TXS 0506+056 is a most likely counterpart of the IceCube neutrino event EHE 170922A. The lack of this redshift prevents a comprehensive understanding of the modeling of the source. We present high signal-to-noise optical spectroscopy, in the range 4100-9000 A˚\textrm{\AA}, obtained at the 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias. The spectrum is characterized by a power law continuum and is marked by faint interstellar features. In the regions unaffected by these features, we found three very weak (EW \sim 0.1 A˚\textrm{\AA}) emission lines that we identify with [O II] 3727 A˚\textrm{\AA}, [O III] 5007 A˚\textrm{\AA}, and [N II] 6583 A˚\textrm{\AA}, yielding the redshift z = 0.3365±\pm0.0010.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.01939,
  title  = {The redshift of the BL Lac object TXS 0506+056},
  author = {Simona Paiano and Renato Falomo and Aldo Treves and Riccardo Scarpa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.01939},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in ApJL