Blazar Alerts with the HAWC Online Flare Monitor

Understand

The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory monitors the gamma-ray sky in the 100 GeV to 100 TeV energy range with > 95% uptime and unprecedented sensitivity for a survey instrument.

• The HAWC Collaboration has implemented an online flare monitor that detects episodes of rapid flaring activity from extragalactic very high energy (VHE) sources in the declination band from -26 to 64 degrees.
• This allows timely alerts to be sent to multiwavelength instruments without human intervention.
• The preliminary configuration of the online flare monitor achieves sensitivity to flares of at least 1 hour duration that attain an average flux of 10 times that of the Crab Nebula.