Related papers: Mining the Blazar Sky
Our present knowledge of the properties of blazars mostly comes from small samples of bright objects, especially regarding studies on their cosmological evolution. Statistically well defined and completely identified samples of faint…
X-ray polarization should provide new probes of magnetic field geometry and acceleration physics near the base of blazar jets, but near-future missions will have limited sensitivity. We thus use existing lower energy data and X-ray…
We describe a uniform all-sky survey of bright blazars, selected primarily by their flat radio spectra, that is designed to provide a large catalog of likely gamma-ray AGN. The defined sample has 1625 targets with radio and X-ray properties…
Recent studies of relativistic jet sources in the Galaxy, also known as microquasars, have been very useful in trying to understand the accretion/ejection processes that take place near compact objects. However, the number of sources…
We report on the Swift/XRT observation and classification of eleven blazar candidates at $z>4$. These sources were selected as part of a sample of extremely radio-loud quasars, in order to focus on quasars with jets oriented roughly close…
Thanks to incredible advances in instrumentation, surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have been able to find and catalog billions of objects, ranging from local M dwarfs to distant quasars. Machine learning algorithms have greatly…
We discuss the properties of the sources in the CLASS Blazar survey which aims at the selection of low radio power (P(5GHz)<10^25 W Hz^-1) blazars. We use VLA data from available catalogues and from our own observations to constrain the…
I address the need for deep blazar surveys by showing that our current understanding of blazars is based on a relatively small number of intrinsically luminous sources. I then review the on-going deeper surveys, addressing in particular…
We report the identification of blazar candidates behind the Magellanic Clouds. The objects were selected from the Magellanic Quasars Survey (MQS), which targeted the entire Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and 70\% of the Small Magellanic…
Clustering is an effective tool for astronomical spectral analysis, to mine clustering patterns among data. With the implementation of large sky surveys, many clustering methods have been applied to tackle spectroscopic and photometric data…
$\it{Context.}$ Various high-energy phenomena in the Universe are associated with blazars, powerful active galaxies with jets pointing to the observer. Novel results relating blazars to high-energy neutrinos, cosmic rays, and even possible…
Data mining techniques, including clustering and classification tasks, for the automatic information extraction from large datasets are increasingly demanded in several scientific fields. In particular, in the astrophysical field, large…
We present a classification-based approach to identify quasi-stellar radio sources (quasars) in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and evaluate its performance on a manually labeled training set. While reasonable results can already be obtained…
Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…
We present deep radio images at 1.4 GHz of a large and complete sample of BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) selected from the Deep X-ray Radio Blazar Survey (DXRBS). We have observed 24 northern sources with the Very Large Array (VLA) in both…
We have detected 523 sources in a survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) Wing with Chandra. By cross-correlating the X-ray data with optical and near-infrared catalogues we have found 300 matches. Using a technique that combines X-ray…
The radio astronomy community is rapidly adopting deep learning techniques to deal with the huge data volumes expected from the next generation of radio observatories. Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) provide a principled way to model…
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 exhibit flux and spectral variations of largest amplitude at the highest frequencies. Therefore, monitoring their variability at X- and gamma-rays is the most effective tool to peer into the mighty powerhouse of these sources. High…
In order to study the status and the possible evolution of clusters of galaxies at intermediate redshifts (z ~ 0.1 - 0.3), as well as their spatial correlation and relationship with the local environment, we built a sample of candidate…