Investigating the Quiescent State of NGC 1275 with VERITAS and Multi-Wavelength Observations

The VERITAS observatory is a ground-based air Cherenkov telescope array that detects very-high-energy gamma-ray emission (VHE; > 100 GeV) from a range of astrophysical sources including more than 80 Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). The majority of these AGN are blazars where relativistic jets aligned within a few degrees to our line of sight cause the observed radiation to be highly Doppler boosted. Radio galaxies are AGN with jets viewed at systematically larger angles to the line of sight, making these objects more challenging to detect in VHE gamma rays. Even so, a few radio galaxies are detected in the VHE including NGC 1275 (3C 84), the central galaxy in the Perseus cluster (z∼0.0176), in which the origin of TeV emission is not still entirely understood. NGC 1275 has a long history of observations across all wavebands, and a very complex morphology that has evolved with time. A study of the January 2017 flare with VERITAS observations found that a multi-component model was required to fit the multi-wavelength spectral energy distribution (SED). In the study presented here, we investigate the quiescent (non-flaring) state of NGC 1275 constructing an SED with contemporaneous observations from Swift-XRT, Swift-UVOT, Fermi-LAT, ALMA, and ATLAS telescopes over the period 2012-2017.