Related papers: Discovering High-$z$ BL Lacs Using Swift/UVOT and …
BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects are a subclass of blazar, distinguished by their featureless optical spectrum. The featureless spectrum presents a challenge in measuring the redshift of the BL Lacs. In this paper, we measure the redshift of BL…
BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects are the prominent members of the third {\it Fermi} Large Area Telescope catalog of $\gamma$-ray sources. Half of the BL Lac population ($\sim$ 300) lack redshift measurements, which is due to the absence of…
Determining redshifts for BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects using the traditional spectroscopic method is challenging due to the absence of strong emission lines in their optical spectra. We employ the photometric dropout technique to determine…
Observations of the gamma-ray sky with Fermi led to significant advances towards understanding blazars, the most extreme class of Active Galactic Nuclei. A large fraction of the population detected by Fermi is formed by BL Lacertae (BL Lac)…
BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) represent a large fraction (22\%) of gamma-ray sources in the Third Fermi Large Area Telescope catalog (3FGL). Nearly half of the BL Lac population remains without a redshift because of their featureless…
Blazars, including BL Lacs and FSRQs, are the most luminous extragalactic {\gamma}-ray sources. They account for about 56% of the sources listed in the recent Fermi-LAT catalog (4FGL-DR4). The optical and UV spectra of BL Lacs are nearly…
The extragalactic $\gamma$-rays sky observed by Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) is dominated by blazars. In the fourth release of the Fermi-LAT Point Source Catalog (4FGL), are sources showing a multifrequency behavior similar to that of…
Direct redshift determination of BL Lac objects is highly challenging as the emission in the optical and near-infrared (NIR) bands is largely dominated by the non-thermal emission from the relativistic jet that points very close to our line…
Context. Blazars are the most numerous class of High Energy (HE; E about 50 MeV - few 100 GeV) and Very High Energy (VHE; E about 100 GeV - 10 TeV) gamma-ray emitters. As of today, a measured spectroscopic redshift is available for only…
Aims: We present optical spectroscopy of a sample of BL Lac objects, to determine their redshift, to study their broad emission line properties and to characterize their close environment. Methods: Twelve objects were observed using the ESO…
BL Lac objects (BLL) are defined by the presence of very weak (typically $<$ 5 {\AA}) or even absent spectral lines. This makes determining their distance particularly challenging, especially at high redshift, where the sources are fainter…
Due to their almost featureless optical/UV spectra, it is challenging to measure the redshifts of BL Lacs. As a result, about 50% of gamma-ray BL Lacs lack a firm measurement of this property, which is fundamental for population studies,…
High synchrotron peak (HSP; $\nu_{sy}^{pk} > 10^{15}$ Hz) BL Lacs are some of the most extreme accelerators in the Universe. Those found at high redshifts ($z>1$) challenge our understanding of blazar evolution models and are crucial for…
We present results of an ongoing program at the ESO VLT for spectroscopy of BL Lac objects lacking a firm redshift estimate and here we report on 15 objects. For 11 sources we confirm the BL Lac classification, and we determine new…
We report on ESO Very Large Telescope optical spectroscopy of 42 BL Lacertae objects of unknown redshift. Nuclear emission lines were observed in 12 objects, while for another six we detected absorption features due to their host galaxy.…
We investigate the spectroscopic optical properties of gamma-ray sources detected with high significance above 50 GeV in the Third Catalog of Hard Fermi-LAT Sources (3FHL) and that are good candidates as TeV emitters. We focus on the 91…
We report on 16 BL Lacertae objects that were proposed to be at z > 1. We present spectroscopic observations secured at the 10.4m GTC that allowed us to assess the redshift of these sources. In particular, for five objects we disprove the…
High redshift blazars are among the most powerful non-explosive sources in the Universe and play a crucial role in understanding the evolution of relativistic jets. To understand these bright objects, we performed a detailed investigation…
We report results of a spectroscopic campaign carried out at the 10 m Gran Telescopio Canarias for a sample of 22 BL Lac objects detected (or candidates) at TeV energies, aimed to determine or constrain their redshift. This is of…
The multi-frequency Sedentary Survey is a flux limited, statistically well-defined sample of highly X-ray dominated BL Lacertae objects (HBLs) which includes 150 sources. In this paper, the third of the series, we report the results of a…