A burst of pulsed VHE gamma rays from AE Aquarii

Abstract

We report the results of observations of AE Aquarii made on 25 occasions between July 1992 and October 1993 with the University of Durham very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray telescopes at Narrabri, N.S.W., Australia. The observations lasted for a total of 78 h and no persistent low-level pulsed emission was detected above an energy threshold of 350 GeV. However, an excess of pulsed VHE γ-rays was observed on 1993 October 11. The burst lasted for approximately 4200 s and occurred at phase 0.62–0.74 in the 9.88 h orbital cycle. The count rate excess was significant at the 0.99997 level and the periodicity was at the second harmonic of the 33 s period The hadron-induced background in the burst data has been suppressed by applying simple imaging techniques to those events recorded by an individual telescope and using trigonometric height of maximum analysis for the events recorded by two telescopes. These two independent results together provide evidence at a probability of chance occurrence of 10 −7, after allowing for degrees of freedom, for the emission of a burst of pulsed γ-rays from AE Aquarii with threshold energy > 350 GeV, which show the characteristic features of γ-ray induced cascades. There is also some evidence to suggest that the brightness spectrum of Čerenkov events recorded during the burst is harder than that recorded in a sample of the background. The flux during the burst was approximately 4% of the total cosmic ray background at E> 350 GeV, corresponding to a peak pulsed luminosity of 10 32 erg s −1