VERITAS Long-Term Observations of Hard Spectrum Blazars

Abstract

The VERITAS collaboration has approved long-term observations on several distant, hard-spectrum blazars. We present first results from VERITAS long-term observations of 1ES1218+304, 1ES0229+200, and 1ES0414+009. Gamma-ray observations of distant, hard-spectrum blazars has emerged as an effective, indirect probe of the universe's diffuse extragalactic background light (EBL), due to the extinction of gamma-rays via the pair production interaction $\gamma_{TeV}\gamma_{EBL}\rightarrow e^{+}e^{-}$, which is expected to produce absorption features in distant gamma-ray sources. The sources presented here emit spectra that are well fit by power laws.