Related papers: A Physical Classification Scheme for Blazars
The past 20 years have seen phenomenal progress in our understanding of BL Lac objects. They form part of the blazar class, which are radio-loud AGN whose relativistic jets are aligned along our line of sight. Several critical milestones…
Blazars are very broadband cosmic sources with spectra spanning over twenty orders of magnitude in frequency, down to the 100 MHz regime in the radio range, up to VHE at several tens of TeV. The modelling of their spectral energy…
Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs) and BL Lac objects detected in the first three months of the Fermi survey neatly separate in the gamma-ray spectral index vs gamma-ray luminosity plane. BL Lac objects are less luminous and have harder…
Blazars are among the most studied sources in high-energy astrophysics as they form the largest fraction of extragalactic gamma-ray sources and are considered prime candidates for being the counterparts of high-energy astrophysical…
We have recently proposed a simplified scenario for blazars in which these sources are classified as flat-spectrum radio quasars or BL Lacs according to the prescriptions of unified schemes, and to a varying combination of Doppler boosted…
Blazars have traditionally been separated into two broad categories based upon their optical emission characteristics; BL Lacs, with faint or no emission lines, and flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) with prominent, broad emission lines.…
High-redshift radio sources provide plentiful opportunities for studying the formation and evolution of early galaxies and supermassive black holes. However, the number of known radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN) above redshift 4 is…
Our knowledge of the blazar surface densities and luminosity functions, which are fundamental parameters, relies still on samples at relatively high flux limits. As a result, our understanding of this rare class of active galactic nuclei is…
We present new spectroscopic identifications for 169 objects in the RASS-Green Bank (RGB) catalog of radio- and X-ray-emitting AGN. These data significantly increase the fraction of bright RGB objects with classifications. Specifically, we…
We present the first deep VLA radio images of flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQ) with multiwavelength emission properties similar to those of BL Lacs with synchrotron X-rays. Our observations of twenty-five of these sources show that their…
We started a follow-up investigation of the Deep X-ray Radio Blazar Survey objects with declination >-10 deg. We undertook a survey with the EVN at 5GHz to make the first images of a complete sample of weak blazars, aiming at a comparison…
We study the correlations of the flux of the broad-line emission ($F_{BLR}$) with the X-ray emission flux, optical emission flux at 5500 \AA and radio emission flux at 5 GHz, respectively, for a large sample of 50 Blazars (39 flat-spectrum…
We analyse 77 \textit{Fermi} sources and their potential low-energy counterparts previously proposed in the literature. These sources were classified as active galactic nuclei, mainly blazars, based on optical spectroscopy. The main goals…
Machine learning has emerged as a powerful tool in the field of gamma-ray astrophysics. The algorithms can distinguish between different source types, such as blazars and pulsars, and help uncover new insights into the high-energy universe.…
We utilize machine learning methods to distinguish BL Lacertae objects (BL Lac) from Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQ) within a sample of likely X-ray blazar counterparts to Fermi 3FGL unassociated gamma-ray sources. From our previous…
We investigate why BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) have values of the Ca H&K break (a stellar absorption feature) lower than low-power radio galaxies and if its use is justified to separate the two classes. For this purpose we relate this…
We present the first measurement of the projected correlation function of 485 gamma-ray selected Blazars, divided in 175 BLLacertae (BL Lacs) and 310 Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs) detected in the 2-year all-sky survey by Fermi-Large…
Blazars can be classified on the basis of their overall Spectral Energy Distribution (SED). BL Lac objects are usually divided in LBL or HBL (Low or High energy peaked BL Lacs), according to the peak frequency of the synchrotron emission,…
The Fermi fourth catalog of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) data release 3 (4LAC-DR3) contains 3407 AGNs, out of which 755 are flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs), 1379 are BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), 1208 are blazars of unknown (BCUs)…
The parsec-scale radio properties of blazars detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have been investigated using observations with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). Comparisons between LAT…