Published November 1, 2013 | Version v1
Journal article

IDENTIFICATION OF NEW GAMMA-RAY BLAZAR CANDIDATES WITH MULTIFREQUENCY ARCHIVAL OBSERVATIONS

  • 1. Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742-2421 (United States)
  • 2. SLAC National Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, 2575 Sand Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025 (United States)
  • 3. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
  • 4. Dipartimento di Fisica, Università Degli Studi di Perugia, I-06123 Perugia (Italy)

Description

Blazars are a highly variable, radio-loud subclass of active galactic nuclei. In order to better understand such objects we must be able to easily identify candidate blazars from the growing population of unidentified sources. Working toward this goal, we attempt to identify new gamma-ray blazar candidates from a sample of 102 previously unidentified sources. These sources are selected from The Astronomer's Telegram and the literature on the basis of non-periodic variability and multi-wavelength behavior. We then attempt to associate these objects to an IR counterpart in the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer all-sky survey. We are able to identify 16 candidate sources whose IR colors are consistent with those of the blazar population. Of those, 13 sources have IR colors indicative of being gamma-ray emitting blazar candidates. These sources all possess archival multi-wavelength observations that support their blazar-like nature

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-6256/146/5/110

Additional details

Identifiers

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Astronomical Journal (New York, N.Y. Online)
Journal Volume
146
Journal Issue
5
Journal Page Range
[10 p.]
ISSN
1538-3881