Related papers: Highly Variable Objects in the Palomar-QUEST Surve…
This paper presents light curves and the first systematic characterization of variability of the 106 objects in the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) Bright AGN Sample (LBAS). Weekly light curves obtained during the first 11 months of survey…
Blazars are highly variable, radio-loud active galactic nuclei with jets oriented at a small angle to the line of sight. The observed emission of these sources covers the whole electromagnetic spectrum from radio frequencies up to the high…
Blazars are known to exhibit variability across a broad range of timescales. This behavior can include periodicity in their $\gamma$-ray emission, whose clear detection remains an ongoing challenge, partly due to the inherent stochasticity…
Time variability of the photon flux is a known feature of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and in particular of blazars. The high frequency peaked BL Lac (HBL) object PKS 2155-304 is one of the brightest sources in the TeV band and has been…
To search for optical variability on a wide range of timescales, we have carried out photometric monitoring of two flat spectrum radio quasars, 3C 454.3 and 3C 279, plus one BL Lac, S5 0716+714, all of which have been exhibiting remarkably…
In preparation for GLAST, we have compiled a sample of blazar candidates to increase the pool of well studied AGN from which GLAST counterparts will be drawn. Sources were selected with our Figure of Merit (FoM) ranking; thus, they have…
Among active galactic nuclei, blazars show extreme variability properties. We here investigate the case of the BL Lac object S4 0954+65 with data acquired in 2019-2020 by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and by the Whole…
High-redshift blazars are among the most powerful objects in the Universe. The spectral and temporal properties of thirty-three distant blazars ($z>2.5$) detected in the high energy $\gamma$-ray band are investigated by analyzing the {\it…
Exploration of the time variability on the sky over a broad range of flux levels and wavelengths is rapidly becoming a new frontier of astronomical research. We describe here briefly the Palomar-QUEST survey being carried out from the…
The variability of blazars in the X-ray and optical regions informs both the physics of their emitting region and places demands on the observer if a program requires that the object be bright or faint. The extensive simultaneous X-ray and…
We compare the variability properties of very high energy gamma-ray emitting BL Lac objects in the optical and radio bands. We use the variability information to distinguish multiple emission components in the jet, to be used as a guidance…
Identifying Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) through their X-ray emission is efficient, but necessarily biased against X-ray-faint objects. We aim to characterize this bias by comparing X-ray-selected AGNs to the ones identified through…
Blazars are radio-loud Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) whose jets have a very small angle to our line of sight. Observationally, the radio emission are mostly compact or a compact-core with a 1-sided jet. With 2.5$^{\prime\prime}$ resolution…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) are some of the brightest and most variable objects in the Universe. Those with relativistic jets observed at small viewing angles are blazars. Due to Doppler boosting, blazars exhibit extreme stochastic…
The long-term optical and infrared color variability of blazars has been investigated with the SMARTS monitoring data. The sample in this study consists of 49 flat spectrum radio quasars and 22 BL Lac objects. The fractional variability…
There is a large degree of variety in the optical variability of quasars and it is unclear whether this is all attributable to a single (set of) physical mechanism(s). We present the results of a systematic search for major flares in AGN in…
We present a milliarcsecond-resolution radio survey of 17 high-redshift (4 < z < 5.4) blazar candidates observed with the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) Network at 5 GHz. The primary objective of this study was to…
Blazars are highly variable sources over timescales that can be as low as minutes. This is the case of the High Energy Peaked BL Lac (HBL) objects showing strong variability in X-rays, which highly correlate with that of the TeV emission.…
Active galactic nuclei come in many varieties. A minority of them are radio-loud, and exhibit two opposite prominent plasma jets extending from the proximity of the supermassive black hole up to megaparsec distances. When one of the…
We present new, simultaneous, multifrequency observations of 45 out of the 55 candidate High Frequency Peakers (HFP) selected by Dallacasa et al. (2000), carried out 3 to 4 years after a first set of observations. Our sub-sample consists of…