Photopolarimetric monitoring of 41 blazars in the optical and near-infrared bands with the Kanata telescope

Details Photopolarimetric monitoring of 41 blazars in the optical and near-infrared bands with the Kanata telescope Photopolarimetric monitoring of 41 blazars in the optical and near-infrared bands with the Kanata telescope

2009-12-18

arxiv.org/abs/0912.3664v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

6 pages, 7 figures, proceeding of conference

Scientific paper

Blazars are a kind of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in which a relativistic jet is considered to be directed along the line of sight. They are characterized by strong and rapid variability of the flux and high polarization. We performed a monitoring of 41 blazars in the optical and near-infrared regions from 2008 to 2009 using TRISPEC attached to the "Kanata" 1.5-m telescope. In this paper, we report the correlation of the flux, color and polarization using our data, and discuss universal features for blazars, which have not fully been established. Three blazars (3C 454.3, QSO 0454$-$234, and PKS 1510$-$089) tended to be redder when they were brighter, only during their faint states. This color behavior suggests that the contribution of a thermal component is strong in the faint states for those objects. Excluding this "redder-when-brighter" phase, we found that 24 blazars tended to be bluer when they were brighter. This number corresponds to 83% among well-observed objects which we observed for $>10$ nights. Thus, we conclude that the "bluer-when-brighter" trend is a universal feature for blazars. On the other hand, the correlation of the flux and the polarization degree is relatively weak; only 10 objects showed a significant positive correlation. We also investigated the luminosity-dependence of the color and polarization, and found that lower luminosity objects have smaller variation amplitudes both in the flux, color, and polarization degree.

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