Blazars are known as extremely luminous and variable active galactic nuclei. Their properties are due to relativistic motion of particles in a plasma jet pointing towards us, with consequent Doppler beaming of the emitted radiation. The central engine is thought to be a supermassive black hole of the order of billion solar masses. However, blazars are hosted in early-type galaxies, which are expected to be the result of galactic mergers, so they may actually be powered by a binary system of black holes, which should be detectable through periodic modulation of the jet emission. Blazars are also formidable particle accelerators and can be responsible for at least some of the very high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube neutrino observatory. Rubin-LSST will be a powerful tool to study blazars as a population up to unprecedented redshift and catch single objects during peculiar activity states that can reveal the underlying physics. These strengths will be exploited by the Blazars Follow Up Task Force born within the AGN Science Collaboration and coordinated by Claudia M. Raiteri, Filippo D’Ammando, and Yannis Liodakis.
Our plans are to:
-
Select blazar candidates based on their optical variability and colours, together with multiwavelength behaviour
-
Study their variability on statistical grounds
-
Investigate blazar environment to recognize their parent population
We will also consider sources of particular interest:
-
Neutrino emitter candidates (resulting from the cross match with high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin detected by neutrino telescopes)
-
(Quasi)periodic sources with robust period estimate (e.g. OJ 287, PG 1553+113, many other cases in the literature to be analysed)
-
Strongly lensed blazars (e.g. PKS 1830-211)
-
Blazars whose outbursts can be due to microlensing by stars in a foreground galaxy (e.g. AO 0235+16, PKS 0537-441)
If you are interested, you are welcome to join our monthly telecons!
Follow our activities in the Discovery Alliance Slack Channel #agnsc-followup-blazars
For further reading, see the paper “Blazar Variability with the Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time” by Raiteri et al. (2022, ApJS, 258, 3)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/ac3bb0/pdf