Insights into the particle acceleration of a peculiar gamma-ray radio galaxy IC 310

by Julian Sitarek (IFAE)

Wednesday 19 Nov 2014, 13:00 → 14:00 Europe/Madrid

Seminar (IFAE)

The radio galaxy IC 310 has recently been identified as a gamma-ray emitter based on observations at GeV energies with Fermi-LAT and at very high energies (VHE, E > 100 GeV) with the MAGIC telescopes. Despite IC 310 having been classified as a radio galaxy with the jet observed at an angle > 10 degree, it exhibits a mixture of multiwavelength properties of a radio galaxy and a blazar, possibly making it a transitional object. On the night of 12/13th of November 2012 the MAGIC telescopes observed a series of violent outbursts from the direction of IC 310 with flux-doubling time scales faster than 5 min and a peculiar spectrum spreading over 2 order of magnitude. Such fast variability constrains the size of the emission region to be smaller than the gravitational radius of its central black hole challenging the shock acceleration models, commonly used in explanation of gamma-ray radiation from active galaxies. Here we will show that this emission can be associated with pulsar-like particle acceleration by the electric field across a magnetospheric gap at the base of the jet.