Spectroscopic Analysis of Fermi-detected Blazars using SDSS-V
Abstract
The automated spectroscopic pipeline of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) systematically assigns Galactic star, galaxy, or typical quasar classifications to jet-dominated blazars, owing to the absence of a non-thermal jet continuum component in its template library. In this study, we present a new, physically motivated, multi-component spectral fitting pipeline that we apply to 746 optical counterparts of Fermi/4FGL-DR4 -ray sources in the SDSS-V Data Release 20 spectroscopic database, yielding 707 well-fitted blazar candidates dominated by Power-law+Galaxy (59.4%), Power-law+Lines (22.6%), and Power-law+QSO (15.0%) model families. Independent WISE infrared (IR) photometry confirms that 96.6% of the 88 sources originally misclassified as Galactic stars by SDSS fall within the canonical blazar region, with 90.9% reclassified as BL Lacertae object (BL Lac) candidates, demonstrating the success of our new pipeline. The new classification scheme naturally recovers the known cosmological separation between BL Lac and Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar (FSRQ) candidates and a separation of approximately one order of magnitude in median -ray luminosity. We compare our redshift estimates to a validation sample of 111 sources in the Third Fermi-LAT Catalogue of High-Energy Sources (3FHL), finding a 10.4% reduction in catastrophic failures ( vs 0.432) over the SDSS pipeline. The equivalent width analysis validates the traditional |EW| = 5 Ang classification boundary at the population level (BL Lac: 4.47 0.15 Ang; FSRQ: 22.86 0.86 Ang), although 49.5% of individual BL Lac candidates exceed this threshold and 51.4% show simultaneous emission and absorption features. This hybrid population challenges the traditional binary blazar classification and points towards a more physically continuous description of blazar properties.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.26175,
title = {Spectroscopic Analysis of Fermi-detected Blazars using SDSS-V},
author = {Mohammed Iddrisu Nlowie and James Aird and Eli Kasai and Amy L. Rankine and Paloma Guetzoyan and Scott Anderson and Catarina Aydar and William N. Brandt and Joel R. Brownstein and Xinyu Dai and Lorena Hernández-García and Paola Rodríguez Hidalgo and Pranavi Hiremath and Anton Koekemoer and Andrea Merloni and Sean Morrison and Mara Salvato and Donald P. Schneider and Axel Schwope and Benny Trakhtenbrot},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.26175},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
34 pages, 17 figures plus appendices. Submitted to MNRAS. Catalogue available as SDSS DR20 Value-Added Catalogue https://www.sdss.org/dr20/data_access/value-added-catalogs/?vac_id=10034 Accompanied visualization python package tool https://github.com/minlowie/Blazar-Analysis-Pipeline