On the origin of the soft photons of the high-synchrotron-peaked blazar PKS 1424+240

Abstract

PKS 1424+240 is a distant very-high-energy gamma-ray BL Lac object with redshift z = 0.601. It has been found that models utilizing pure synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) processes normally need extreme input parameters (e.g. a very low magnetic field intensity and an extraordinarily high Doppler factor) to explain this particular object spectral energy distributions (SEDs). In order to avoid these extreme model parameters, various other models have been proposed (e.g. the two-zone SSC model or lepto-hadronic model). In this work, we employ the traditional one-zone leptonic model after including a weak external Compton component in order to explore the simultaneous multiwavelength SEDs of PKS 1424+240 in both the high ( We find that the input parameters of the magnetic field and Doppler factor are roughly consistent with those of other BL Lacs if a weak external photon field from either the broad line region (BLR) or the dust torus is assumed. However, the required energy density of seed photons from the BLR or torus is about three orders of magnitude lower than that the energy density estimated from the observations in luminous quasars (e.g. flat-spectrum radio quasars, FSRQs). This result suggests that the BLR/torus in BL Lacs is much weaker than that of luminous FSRQs (but has not fully disappeared), and that the inverse-Compton process of external photons from the BLR/torus may still play a role even in high-synchrotron-peaked blazars.