Radio and optical intra-day variability observations of five blazars

Abstract

We carried out a pilot campaign of radio and optical band intra-day variability (IDV) observations of five blazars (3C66A, S5 0716+714, OJ287, B0925+504, and BL Lacertae) on December 18--21, 2015 by using the radio telescope in Effelsberg (Germany) and several optical telescopes in Asia, Europe, and America. After calibration, the light curves from both 5 GHz radio band and the optical R band were obtained, although the data were not smoothly sampled over the sampling period of about four days. We tentatively analyse the amplitudes and time scales of the variabilities, and any possible periodicity. The blazars vary significantly in the radio (except 3C66A and BL Lacertae with only marginal variations) and optical bands on intra- and inter-day time scales, and the source B0925+504 exhibits a strong quasi-periodic radio variability. No significant correlation between the radio- and optical-band variability appears in the five sources, which we attribute to the radio IDV being dominated by interstellar scintillation whereas the optical variability comes from the source itself. However, the radio- and optical-band variations appear to be weakly correlated in some sources and should be investigated based on well-sampled data from future observations.

arXiv comment6 pages, 6 figures, accepted by MNRAS

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• Multi-wavelength Intra-day Variability and Quasi-periodic Oscillation in Blazars
• An optical overview of blazars with LAMOST I: Hunting changing-look blazars and new redshift estimates
• New jet feature in the parsec-scale jet of the blazar OJ287 connected to the 2017 teraelectronvolt flaring activity
• A 31.3 day Transient Quasiperiodic Oscillation in Gamma-ray Emission from Blazar S5 0716+714
• The intraday variations of polarization vector direction in radio source S5 0716+714
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