Over the last decade more than five thousand gamma-ray sources were detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Given the large positional uncertainty of the telescope, nearly 30% of these sources remain without an obvious counterpart in lower energies; these are called unassociated gamma-ray sources (UGSs). This motivated the release of several catalogs of gamma-ray counterpart candidates and several follow up campaigns in the last decade.
Majority is dominated by blazars
Between the associated sources, the large majority is composed by blazars, divided into BL Lacs, with a characteristic lineless spectrum (see figure below), and flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs), with broad emission lines and radio spectral index α < 0.5 (defined by the flux density S_ν ∝ ν^−α). In this sense, some of the most successful catalogs of gamma-ray candidate counterparts are the WISE Blazar-Like Radio-Loud Sources (WIBRaLS) catalog and the Kernel Density Estimation selected candidate BL Lacs (KDEBLLACS) catalog, both selecting blazar-like sources based on their infrared colors from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).
In this work we characterized these two catalogs, clarifying the true nature of their sources based on their optical spectra from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release (DR) 15, thus testing how efficient they are in selecting true blazars. If a WIBRaLS2 or KDEBLLAC source is a true blazar, its spectrum may look like the following:
Typical BL Lac spectrum.
Typical FSRQ spectrum.
Results
Based on the optical SDSS spectra, we found that at least ~30% of each catalog is composed by confirmed blazars, with quasars (QSOs) being the major contaminants in the case of WIBRaLS2 (~58%) and normal galaxies in the case of KDEBLLACS (~38.2%). We found that specially in the case of KDEBLLACS, the contaminants are mainly concentrated in the edges of the WISE color-color diagram (see figure below) and can be easily separated from the spectroscopically confirmed BL Lacs.
At least 30% of KDEBLLACS is composed by blazars.
The major contaminants in KDEBLLACS are QSOs and normal galaxies and they are concentrated mainly in the edges of the WISE color-color diagram.
Some sources in the Fermi-LAT catalogs are considered blazar candidates of uncertain type (BCUs) because the adopted association methods select a counterpart that satisfies at least one of the following conditions: i) An object classified as blazar of uncertain or transitional type in Roma-BZCAT. ii) A source with multiwavelength data indicating a typical two-humped blazar-like spectral energy distribution (SED) and/or a flat radio spectrum. BCUs are divided into three sub-types:
– BCU I: the counterpart has a published optical spectrum which is not sensitive enough for classifying it as FSRQ or BL Lac.
– BCU II: there is no available optical spectrum but an evaluation of the SED synchrotron peak position is possible.
– BCU III: the counterpart shows typical blazar broadband emission and a flat radio spectrum, but lacks a optical spectrum and reliable measurement of the synchrotron peak position.
In 4FGL, 1155 sources are considered as BCUs. Our analysis based on the optical spectra available in SDSS DR15 allowed us to give a conclusive classification for 11 of them: 2 BL Lacs, 4 BL Lacs with spectra dominated by the host galaxy, and 5 FSRQs. The SDSS spectral analysis also allowed us to find 25 new BL Lac objects which will be included in future releases of Roma-BZCAT.
This work contributes to a better understanding of the γ-ray sky in the Fermi-LAT era. In particular, the community will benefit from the characterization of WIBRaLS2 and KDEBLLACS in population studies of blazars and in subsequent programs of spectroscopic follow-up needed to confirm the nature of the UGSs.
The detailed discussion can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.05229
This work was supported by FAPESP (Fundação de Ampara à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) under grants 2016/25484-9, 2018/24801-6 and 2017/01461-2; and many other institutions.
