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Very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV)gamma-ray flaring activity of the high-frequency peaked BL Lac object PG 1553 + 113 has been detected by the H.E.S.S. telescopes. The flux of the source increased by a factor of 3 during the nights of 2012 April 26 and 27 with respect to the archival measurements with a hint of intra-night variability. No counterpart of this event has been detected in the Fermi-Large Area Telescope data. This pattern is consistent with VHE gamma(-)ray flaring being caused by the injection of ultrarelativistic particles, emitting.-rays at the highest energies. The dataset offers a unique opportunity to constrain the redshift of this source at z = 0.49 +/- 0.04 using a novel method based on Bayesian statistics. The indication of intra-night variability is used to introduce a novel method to probe for a possible Lorentz invariance violation (LIV), and to set limits on the energy scale at which Quantum Gravity (QG) effects causing LIV may arise. For the subluminal case, the derived limits are E-QG,E- 1 > 4.10 x 10(17) GeV and E-QG,E- 2 > 2.10 x 10(10) GeV for linear and quadratic LIV effects, respectively.
Very high-energy gamma-ray emission from PKS 0447-439 was detected with the H. E. S. S. Cherenkov telescope array in December 2009. This blazar is one of the brightest extragalactic objects in the Fermi bright source list and has a hard spectrum in the MeV to GeV range. In the TeV range, a photon index of 3.89 +/- 0.37 (stat) +/- 0.22 (sys) and a flux normalisation at 1 TeV, phi(1) (TeV) = (3.5 +/- 1.1(stat) +/- 0.9(sys)) x 10(-13) cm(-2) s(-1) TeV-1 were found. The detection with H. E. S. S. triggered observations in the X-ray band with the Swift and RXTE telescopes. Simultaneous UV and optical data from Swift UVOT and data from the optical telescopes ATOM and ROTSE are also available. The spectrum and light curve measured with H. E. S. S. are presented and compared to the multi-wavelength data at lower energies. A rapid flare is seen in the Swift XRT and RXTE data, together with a flux variation in the UV band, at a time scale of the order of one day. A firm upper limit of z < 0.59 on the redshift of PKS 0447-439 is derived from the combined Fermi-LAT and H. E. S. S. data, given the assumptions that there is no upturn in the intrinsic spectrum above the Fermi-LAT energy range and that absorption on the extragalactic background light (EBL) is not weaker than the lower limit provided by current models. The spectral energy distribution is well described by a simple one-zone synchrotron self-Compton scenario, if the redshift of the source is less than z less than or similar to 0.4.