Environments of BL Lac Objects

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Scientific paper

In current theory, BL Lac objects arise from one of two processes: relativistically beamed jets nearly in the line of sight, or gravitationally lensed or microlensed subregions of background QSOs. To better explore these possibilities, we used the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to obtain high resolution two-color optical images of a complete sample of x-ray selected BL Lac objects (XBLs) from the Einstein Medium Sensitivity Survey, as well as a large comparison sample of radio-selected BL Lac objects (RBLs). >From these images we extracted the isophotal profiles of the host galaxies of the two samples and found them to be generally consistent with brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs), first rank elliptical galaxies, and Fanaroff-Riley type 1 radio galaxies, arguing in favor of the jet hypothesis. Both the XBL and RBL samples include a subset of ``peculiar objects'' which warrant further observation. It is possible that these objects are more consistent with the gravitational lens theory. We also examined galaxies in the region around the objects to study the clustering properties around BL Lacs. If some of the objects reside in BCGs, then we should be able to find clusters surrounding them. We determined the amplitude of the BL Lac-galaxy spatial covariance function (Bgb) of the surrounding galaxies. Several BL Lac fields have a Bgb comparable with that of Abell class 1 or 2 clusters, but other images show no evidence for rich clustering.

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