VERITAS sees the awakening of a long-dormant blazar

The VERITAS Collaboration has issued an Astronomers Telegram to notify other observatories of the bright gamma-ray flux that VERITAS has measured from the blazar H 1426+428. Zach did part of the analysis that led to the announcement.

This is a very interesting object with a relativistic jet that is capable of accelerating particles to extreme energies, and this bright flux episode is allowing us to observe the limits of the particle acceleration mechanism that powers gamma-ray emission.
H 1426+428 is also a sort of a long-standing puzzle. It was detected by the previous generation of TeV observatories in the late 1990s and early 2000s and went quiet for almost 20 years. Maybe this round of observations will explain this very long-lived fading and why H 1426+428 decided to re-brighten again.

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