The discovery of high power - high synchrotron peak blazars

Abstract

We study the quasi-simultaneous near-IR, optical, UV, and X-ray photometry of eleven gamma-ray selected blazars for which redshift estimates larger than 1.2 have been recently provided. Four of these objects turn out to be high-power blazars with the peak of their synchrotron emission between ~ 3 x 10^15 and ~ 10^16 Hz, and therefore of a kind predicted to exist but never seen before. This discovery has important implications for our understanding of physical processes in blazars, including the so-called "blazar sequence", and might also help constraining the extragalactic background light through gamma-ray absorption since two sources are strongly detected even in the 10 - 100 GeV Fermi-LAT band. Based on our previous work and their high powers, these sources are very likely high-redshift flat-spectrum radio quasars with their emission lines swamped by the non-thermal continuum.

5 pages, 6 colour figures, accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Cited by in corpus (44)

• The Third Catalog of Active Galactic Nuclei Detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope
• The Fermi blazar sequence
• The Cosmic Evolution of Fermi BL Lacertae Objects
• TXS 0506+056, the first cosmic neutrino source, is not a BL Lac
• Are both BL Lacs and pulsar wind nebulae the astrophysical counterparts of IceCube neutrino events?
• Compton Dominance and the Blazar Sequence
• An Optical View of BL Lacertae Objects
• A simplified view of blazars: the gamma-ray case
• The Central Engines of Fermi Blazars
• Leptonic and Hadronic Radiative Processes in Supermassive-Black-Hole Jets
• 1WHSP: an IR-based sample of $\sim$1,000 VHE $\gamma$-ray blazar candidates
• The red blazar PMN J2345-1555 becomes blue
• Blue Fermi Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars
• The Relativistic Jet Dichotomy and the End of the Blazar Sequence
• New constraints on the structure and dynamics of black hole jets
• Collective Evidence for Inverse Compton Emission from External Photons in High-Power Blazars
• Synchrotron and inverse-Compton emission from blazar jets - IV. BL Lac type blazars and the physical basis for the blazar sequence
• Disentangling Hadronic and Leptonic Cascade Scenarios from the Very-High-Energy Gamma-Ray Emission of Distant Hard-Spectrum Blazars
• Basic properties of Fermi blazars and the "blazar sequence"
• New High-z Fermi BL Lacs with the Photometric Dropout Technique
• The sequence of Compton dominance in blazars based on data from WISE and Fermi/LAT
• Jet Power of Jetted Active Galactic Nuclei: Implication for Evolution and Unification
• Luminous and high-frequency peaked blazars: the origin of the $\gamma$-ray emission from PKS 1424+240
• An active state of the BL Lac Object Markarian 421 detected by INTEGRAL in April 2013
• INTEGRAL view of AGN
• Cosmological Evolution of Fermi-LAT Gamma-ray Blazars Using Novel Nonparametric Methods
• Hunting distant BL Lacs with the photometric technique using Swift and SARA
• Using Neural Networks to Differentiate Newly Discovered BL Lacs and FSRQs among the 4FGL Unassociated Sources Employing Gamma-ray, X-ray, UV/Optical and IR Data
• What determines the observational differences of blazars?
• Jets, black holes and disks in blazars
• Probing the physical properties of the intergalactic medium using blazars
• Classifying blazar candidates from the 3FGL unassociated catalog into BL Lacs and FSRQs using Swift and WISE data
• NuSTAR Observations and multi-wavelength modeling of the high-redshift BL Lac Object 4FGL J2146.5-1344
• Medium-band observation of the neutrino emitting blazar, TXS 0506+056
• Identifying TeV Source Candidates among Fermi-LAT Unclassified Blazars
• Contemporaneous broadband observations of three high-redshift BL Lac Objects
• XMM-NuSTAR Observation and Multiwavelength SED Modeling of Blazar 4FGL J1520.8-0348
• Monitoring the Extragalactic High Energy Sky
• Is BZB J1450+5201 the most distant $\gamma$-ray BL Lacertae object?
• Central Engine and Spectral Energy Distribution Properties of High Redshift Gamma Ray Blazars
• The physical properties of candidate neutrino-emitter blazars
• Time Domain Astronomy with the THESEUS Satellite
• Uncovering the physics behind the blazar sequence using a realistic model for jet emission
• The Gamma-ray Luminosity Function of Flat-Spectrum Radio Quasars