Related papers: Optical imaging and spectroscopy of BL Lac objects
High energy observations of extreme BL Lac objects, such as 1ES 0229+200 or 1ES 0347-121, recently focused interest both for blazar and jet physics and for the implication on the extragalactic background light and intergalactic magnetic…
The BL Lacertae object PKS 1413+135 is associated with a disk dominated galaxy which heavily absorbs the BL Lac nucleus at optical and X-ray wavelengths. It has been argued whether this galaxy is actually the host galaxy of PKS 1413+135 or…
Aims: The determination of elusive redshifts of bright BL Lac objects Methods: We use the capabilities of newly available spectrograph X-Shooter at European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope, that combines high resolution and…
BL Lac objects are low--power active nuclei exhibiting a variety of peculiar properties that are caused by the presence of a relativistic jet and orientation effects. We present here adaptive optics near-IR images at high spatial resolution…
We investigate the properties of the three BL Lac objects, PKS 2201+044, 3C 371 and PKS 0521-365, that exhibit prominent optical jets. We present high resolution near-IR images of the jet of the first two, obtained with an innovative…
Host galaxies of Active Galactic Nuclei give crucial information on the interaction between accreting Supermassive Black Holes and their surroundings, and on their common evolution. Their study in the case of aligned jetted AGN - BL…
The BL Lac object RGB 1745+398 lies in an environment that makes it possible to study the cluster around it more deeply than the environments of other BL Lac objects. The cluster centered on the BL Lac works as a strong gravitational lens,…
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…
We present H-band imaging of 23 low redshift (z < 0.3) BL Lac objects that were previously investigated by us in the R-band. For all the observed objects, the host galaxy is well represented by an elliptical model, with average scale length…
We present the analysis of archival data from ROSAT and ASCA of a serendipitous source PKS 2316-423. According to its featureless non-thermal radio/optical continuum, the object has been assumed as a BL Lac candidate in the literature. It…
Multi-band near-infrared images of twelve BL Lacertae objects were obtained with the 2.5m telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in order to determine the properties of their underlying host galaxies. Resolved emission was clearly…
Near-infrared and optical imaging of BL Lac host galaxies is used to investigate their colour properties. We find that the R-H colour and colour gradient distributions of the BL Lac hosts are much wider than those for normal ellipticals,…
High-energy observations of extreme BL Lac objects, such as 1ES0229+200 or 1ES 0347-121, recently focused interest both for blazar and jet physics and for the implication on the extragalactic background light and intergalactic magnetic…
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 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…
We investigate the environments of galaxies around BL Lac objects and FR I radiogalaxies, the alleged parent populations of misaligned sources. We compare the environment of a sample of 50 BL Lac objects at 0.1<z<0.33 with that of a sample…
PKS 1413+135 is one of the most peculiar blazars known. Its strange properties led to the hypothesis almost four decades ago that it is gravitationally lensed by a mass concentration associated with an intervening galaxy. It exhibits…
Models that seek to unify BL Lacs and low-power radio galaxies predict that the two types of object should show similar isotropically emitted X-ray emission. Testing this is usually limited by difficulties in separating strong X-ray…
We study the cosmological evolution of BL Lac objects by applying the Ve/Va analysis to a new sample of 55 objects presented for the first time in this paper. This sample has been selected from the 239 sources with the brightest X-ray flux…
We present analysis of a new flux limited sample of 72 X-ray selected BL Lacertae objects with known redshifts for 59 of them. We find the more X-ray dominated BL Lac having negative evolution with redshift, while intermediate objects show…