English

Why are some BL Lacs detected by \fermi, but others not ?

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2015-06-18 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

By cross-correlating an archival sample of 170 BL Lacs with 2 year \fermilat AGN sample, we have compiled a sample of 100 BL Lacs with \fermi detection (FBLs), and a sample of 70 non-\fermi BL Lacs (NFBLs). We compared various parameters of FBLs with those of NFBLs, including the redshift, the low frequency radio luminosity at 408 MHz (L408MHzL_{\rm 408MHz}), the absolute magnitude of host galaxies (MhostM_{\rm host}), the polarization fraction from NVSS survey (PNVSSP_{\rm NVSS}), the observed arcsecond scale radio core flux at 5 GHz (FcoreF_{\rm core}) and jet Doppler factor; all the parameters are directly \textbf{measured} or derived from available data from literatures. We found that the Doppler factor is on average larger in FBLs than in NFBLs, and the Fermi γFermi~ \gamma-ray detection rate is higher in sources with higher Doppler factor. In contrast, there are no significant differences in terms of the intrinsic parameters of redshift, L408MHz L_{\rm 408MHz}, Mhost M_{\rm host} and PNVSS P_{\rm NVSS}. FBLs seem to have a higher probability of exhibiting measurable proper motion. These results strongly indicate a higher beaming effect in FBLs compared to NFBLs. The radio core flux is found to be strongly correlated with γ\gamma-ray flux, which remains after excluding the common dependence of the Doppler factor. At the fixed Doppler factor, FBLs have systematically larger radio core flux than NFBLs, implying lower γ\gamma-ray emission in NFBLs since the radio and γ\gamma-ray flux are significantly correlated. Our results indicate that the Doppler factor is an important parameter of γ\gamma-ray detection, the non-detection of γ\gamma-ray emission in NFBLs is likely due to low beaming effect, and/or low intrinsic γ\gamma-ray flux, and the gamma-rays are likely produced co-spatially with the arcsecond-scale radio core radiation and mainly through the SSC process.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1401.0652,
  title  = {Why are some BL Lacs detected by \fermi, but others not ?},
  author = {Zhongzu Wu and D. R. Jiang and Minfeng Gu and Liang Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1401.0652},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures, accepted by A&A