The nature of the intra-night optical variability in blazars
Abstract
In this paper we present results of a short-term optical monitoring of 13 blazars. The objects were monitored mostly in the R-band for a total of ~ 160 hours between 2006 and 2011. We study the nature of the short-term variations and show that most of them could be described as slow, smooth, and (almost) linear changes of up to ~ 0.1 mag/hour, but many objects show no short-term variations at all. In fact, we found only ~ 2 per cent chance to observe variability of more than 0.1 mag/hour for the sample we observed. Hints for quasi-periodic oscillations at very low amplitude levels are also found for some objects. We briefly discuss some of the possible mechanisms to generate the intra-night variability and the quasi-periodic oscillations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1207.5945,
title = {The nature of the intra-night optical variability in blazars},
author = {R. Bachev and E. Semkov and A. Strigachev and Alok C. Gupta and Haritma Gaur and B. Mihov and S. Boeva and L. Slavcheva-Mihova},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.5945},
year = {2013}
}
Comments
10 pages, 13 figures, 1 table, Accepted for Publication in MNRAS