Intranight optical variability of blazars
In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jg. 348 (2004), Heft 1, S. 176-186
Online
academicJournal
- print, 34 ref
Zugriff:
We present results of a multi-epoch intranight optical monitoring of 11 blazars consisting of six BL Lac objects and five radio core-dominated quasars (CDQs). These densely sampled and sensitive R-band CCD observations, carried out from 1998 November to 2002 May during a total of 47 nights with an average of 6.5 h per night, have enabled us to detect variability amplitudes as low as ∼1 per cent on intranight time-scales. A distinction is found for the first time between the intranight optical variability (INOV) properties of the these two classes of relativistically beamed radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGNs). BL Lacs are found to show a duty cycle (DC) of INOV of ∼60 per cent, in contrast to CDQs, which show a much smaller INOV DC of ∼20 per cent, the difference being attributable mainly to the weakly polarized CDQs. On longer time-scales (i.e. between a week to a few years) variability is seen from all the CDQs and BL Lacs in our sample. The results reported here form part of our long-term programme to understand the intranight optical variability characteristics of the four main classes of luminous AGNs, i.e. radio-quiet quasars (RQQs) and radio lobe-dominated quasars (LDQs), as well as CDQs and BL Lac objects.
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Intranight optical variability of blazars
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | SAGAR, Ram ; STALIN, C. S ; GOPAL-KRISHNA ; WIITA, Paul J |
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Zeitschrift: | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jg. 348 (2004), Heft 1, S. 176-186 |
Veröffentlichung: | Oxford: Blackwell Science, 2004 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
Umfang: | print, 34 ref |
ISSN: | 0035-8711 (print) |
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