Study of 23 day periodicity of Blazar Mkn501 in 1997

Abstract

We confirm a 23 day periodicity during a large flare in 1997 for X-ray data of X-ray satellite RXTE all sky monitor(ASM), 2 TeV gamma ray data from Utah Seven Telescope and HEGRA, with a Fourier analysis. We found the three results to be the same with a newly estimated error. We confirm the presence of a frequency dependent power (1/f noise) in a frequency-power diagram. Further, we calculated a chance probability of the occurrence of the 23 day periodicity by considering the 1/f noise and obtained a chance probability 4.88*10^-3 for the HEGRA data: this is more significant than previous result by an order. We also obtained an identical peridoicity with another kind of timing analysis-epoch folding method for the ASM data and HEGRA data. We strongly suggest an existence of the periodicity. We divided the HEGRA data into two data sets, analyzed them with a Fourier method, and found an unstableness of the periodicity with a 3.4 sigma significance. We also analyzed an energy spectra of the X-ray data of a RXTE proportional counter array and we found that a combination of three parameters-a magnetic field, a Lorentz factor, and a beaming factor-is related to the periodicity.