Fermi-LAT Blazars in Low Optical States
ATel #6075; S. B. Cenko (NASA/GSFC), R. W. Romani (Stanford), W. Zheng, A. V. Filippenko, and D. P. Cohen (UC Berkeley)
on 17 Apr 2014; 03:19 UT
Credential Certification: S. Bradley Cenko (cenko@astro.berkeley.edu)
Subjects: Optical, AGN, Blazar
We report on further optical monitoring of bright Fermi-LAT blazars with the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (ATEL #5703, #6053).
Of the 157 sources regularly observed with KAIT, three appear to be at or near historically low flux values:
J0909+0121: At R ~ 17.0 mag, down by > 1 mag from a peak of R = 15.8 on 17 November 2010 UT.
J1549+0237: At R ~ 17.1 mag, down by > 1.5 mag from a peak of R = 15.9 on 23 June 2011 UT.
J1635+3808: At R ~ 17.5 mag, down by > 2.5 mag from a peak of R = 14.6 on 12 July 2011 UT.
All three are flat-spectrum radio quasars with known (spectroscopic) redshifts. We encourage follow-up observations to more fully characterize the nature of their host galaxies.
The full light curves of all 157 blazars monitored by KAIT can be found at the following URL:
http://hercules.berkeley.edu/kait-agn
