A study of the gamma-ray emission from the blazar S50716+71 using the Fermi-LAT telescope

Sammanfattning: This thesis sums up a bachelor project in which gamma-ray emission from an extra-galactic source (S50716+71) is studied using data collected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). The emission consists of 12,5 years of data (April 2008 to February 2020) in the energy range 100 MeV - 300 GeV. The source has a high significance (>298) and is believed to be an active galactic nucleus in which there have to be mechanisms able to accelerate photons to these high energies. The mechanisms are believed to be of non-thermal origin and the general consensus is that they are the synchrotron radiation-process as well as the inverse Compton-process. These processes are discussed to some extent in the thesis as part of a fairly large theoretical background. The data was analyzed in several ways. The Enrico software contained in the package Fermitools provided by NASA was used to create curves of the flux as a function of time (lightcurves) as well as spectral distributions. The light curve showed that the source varies considerably with hardly any “quiet periods” at all during the twelve-year period. The light curve also showed a fast rise and fall of intensity between the high intensity and low intensity points. Spectral analyses were made for six chosen time-periods of interest through the fitting of three different functions, a powerlaw-function, a logparabola-function and a powerlaw function with exponential cutoff. The powerlaw function with exponential cutoff was favored in all periods except one where the log parabola-function was preferred. The data from one of the periods was then put into a multi-wavelength context of the source showing that the data is in agreement with previous collected data. This broad spectrum was then used to model the underlying energy distribution through a theoretical framework called the Synchrotron Self-Compton model (SSC). This was done using a modelling software called JetSet. The modelling resulted in a reasonable fit of the data and parameters that overall (at least in magnitude) seem to agree with results from other publications.