MAGIC observations of the giant radio galaxy M87 in a low-emission state between 2005 and 2007


Abstract in English

We present the results of a long M87 monitoring campaign in very high energy $gamma$-rays with the MAGIC-I Cherenkov telescope. We aim to model the persistent non-thermal jet emission by monitoring and characterizing the very high energy $gamma$-ray emission of M87 during a low state. A total of 150,h of data were taken between 2005 and 2007 with the single MAGIC-I telescope, out of which 128.6,h survived the data quality selection. We also collected data in the X-ray and textit{Fermi}--LAT bands from the literature (partially contemporaneous). No flaring activity was found during the campaign. The source was found to be in a persistent low-emission state, which was at a confidence level of $7sigma$. We present the spectrum between 100,GeV and 2,TeV, which is consistent with a simple power law with a photon index $Gamma=2.21pm0.21$ and a flux normalization at 300,GeV of $(7.7pm1.3) times 10^{-8}$ TeV$^{-1}$ s$^{-1}$ m$^{-2}$. The extrapolation of the MAGIC spectrum into the GeV energy range matches the previously published textit{Fermi}--LAT spectrum well, covering a combined energy range of four orders of magnitude with the same spectral index. We model the broad band energy spectrum with a spine layer model, which can satisfactorily describe our data.

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