Investigating Possible Correlations between Gamma-Ray and Optical Lightcurves for TeV-Detected Northern Blazars over 8 Years of Observations
arXiv:2307.00333 · doi:10.3390/galaxies11040081
Abstract
Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGN) having relativistic jets aligned within a few degrees of our line-of-sight and form the majority of the AGN detected in the TeV regime. The Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) is a pair-conversion telescope, sensitive to photons having energies between 20 MeV and 2 TeV, and is capable of scanning the entire gamma-ray sky every three hours. Despite the remarkable success of the Fermi mission, many questions still remain unanswered, such as the site of gamma-ray production and the emission mechanisms involved. The Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) is a high cadence all sky survey system optimized to be efficient for finding potentially dangerous asteroids, as well as in tracking and searching for highly variable and transient sources, such as AGN. In this study, we investigate possible correlations between the Fermi-LAT observations in the 100 MeV-300 GeV energy band and the ATLAS optical data in the R-band, centered at 679 nm, for a sample of 18 TeV-detected northern blazars over 8 years of observations between 2015 and 2022. Under the assumption that the optical and gamma-ray flares are produced by the same outburst propagating down the jet, the strong correlations found for some sources suggest a single-zone leptonic model of emission.
11 pages, 5 figures, Accepted in Galaxies. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.02860
References in corpus (13)
- Incremental Fermi Large Area Telescope Fourth Source Catalog
- Modeling the Emission Processes in Blazars
- New constraints on the Mid-IR EBL from the HESS discovery of VHE gamma rays from 1ES 0229+200
- Gamma-Ray Studies of Blazars: Synchro-Compton Analysis of Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars
- Detection of significant cm to sub-mm band radio and gamma-ray correlated variability in Fermi bright blazars
- Time-correlation between the radio and gamma-ray activity in blazars and the production site of the gamma-ray emission
- A method for the estimation of the significance of cross-correlations in unevenly sampled red-noise time series
- Discovery of Very High Energy gamma-rays from 1ES 1011+496 at z=0.212
- Temporal Correlations Between Optical and Gamma-ray Activity in Blazars
- Multifrequency Studies of the Peculiar Quasar 4C +21.35 During the 2010 Flaring Activity
- Optical/-ray blazar flare correlations: understanding the high-energy emission process using ASAS-SN and Fermi light curves
- Locating the gamma-ray emission region in the brightest Fermi-LAT Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars
- VERITAS discovery of very high energy gamma-ray emission from S3 1227+25 and multiwavelength observations