Swift obs. of Mrk 421. IV. 5.5yrs obs.

We present the spectral and timing results obtained during the intense observations of Mrk 421 by the Swift-based ultraviolet to X-ray instruments during 2018 April-2023 December. The source showed various strengths of X-ray flaring activity, exceeding a level of 3.5x10^-9^erg/cm^2^/s during the strongest 0.3-10keV flares. Our study identifies a number of intraday brightness variability, including 61 instances that occurred within 1ks exposures that are consistent with the shock-in-jet scenario and accompanied by significant, fast spectral changes. The source exhibited extreme spectral properties with dominance of the log-parabolic distributions of photons with energy and the frequent occurrence of hard photon indices in the 0.3-10keV and 0.3-300GeV bands, with the peak of synchrotron spectral energy distribution Ep detected at the energies beyond 29keV for the first time. The source showed very fast transitions of log-parabolic-to-power-law spectra, most plausibly caused by turbulence-driven relativistic magnetic reconnection. Our spectral results also demonstrate the importance of the first-order Fermi mechanism within the magnetic field of different confinement efficiencies, stochastic acceleration, transitions in the turbulence spectrum, and hadronic cascades. The X-ray, UV, and {gamma}-ray fluxes showed a lognormal variability, which hints at the imprint of accretion disk instabilities on the blazar jet, as well as the possible presence of hadronic cascades. The UV and {gamma}-ray variabilities demonstrated weak correlations with the X-ray flaring activity, which is not consistent with simple synchrotron self-Compton models and requires more complex particle acceleration and emission scenarios.

Identifier
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJS/275/23
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJS/275/23
Related Identifier https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJS/275/23
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJS/275/23
Provenance
Creator Kapanadze B.; Gurchumelia A.; Aller M.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2025
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Cosmology; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics