THE THIRD CATALOG OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI DETECTED BY THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE

By M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, W. Atwood, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, J. González, R. Bellazzini, E. Bissaldi and 138 more. 2015

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The third catalog of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) detected by the Fermi-LAT (3LAC) is presented. It is based on the third Fermi-LAT catalog (3FGL) of sources detected between 100 MeV and 300 GeV with a Test Statistic greater than 25, between 2008 August 4 and 2012 July 31. The 3LAC includes 1591 AGNs located at high Galactic latitudes ( ∣ b ∣ > 10 ° ?> ), a 71% increase over the second catalog based on 2 years of data. There are 28 duplicate associations, thus 1563 of the 2192 high-latitude gamma-ray sources of the 3FGL catalog are AGNs. Most of them (98%) are blazars. About half of the newly detected blazars are of unknown type, i.e., they lack spectroscopic information of sufficient quality to determine the strength of their emission lines. Based on their gamma-ray spectral properties, these sources are evenly split between flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and BL Lacs. The most abundant detected BL Lacs are of the high-synchrotron-peaked (HSP) type. About 50% of the BL Lacs have no measured redshifts. A few new rare outliers (HSP-FSRQs and high-luminosity HSP BL Lacs) are reported. The general properties of the 3LAC sample confirm previous findings from earlier catalogs. The fraction of 3LAC blazars in the total population of blazars listed in BZCAT remains non-negligible even at the faint ends of the BZCAT-blazar radio, optical, and X-ray flux distributions, which hints that even the faintest known blazars could eventually shine in gamma-rays at LAT-detection levels. The energy-flux distributions of the different blazar populations are in good agreement with extrapolation from earlier catalogs.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9548b8cdf75f2dc5d22f0fd07b5e81d68a07f334

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Citations in the corpus

• MOJAVE. XIII. PARSEC-SCALE AGN JET KINEMATICS ANALYSIS BASED ON 19 YEARS OF VLBA OBSERVATIONS AT 15 GHz (2016, background): “6−0017 listed by Ackermann et al. (2015).”
• Fermi Large Area Telescope Fourth Source Catalog (2019, methodology): “The 28 other AGNs include five compact steep spectrum radio sources (CSS, three are new: 3C 138, 3C 216, 3C 309.1), two SSRQs (new is 3C 212), nine narrow-line Seyferts 1 (NLSY1), one Note.”
• Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, background): “By integrating the best fit LF, taking into account the estimated amount of cosmological evolution, the distribution of blazar spectral slopes and EBL attenuation, the authors estimated the contribution of AGN to the extragalactic γ -ray background (EBG, Ackermann et al. 2015a).”
• The Search for Spatial Extension in High-latitude Sources Detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (2018, methodology): “For sources that have blazar associations, we take the blazar characteristics (redshift, optical class, synchrotron peak frequency) from the 3LAC (Ackermann et al. 2015) or 3FHL for sources with a 3FGL or 3FHL association, respectively.”
• 3FHL: The Third Catalog of Hard Fermi-LAT Sources (2017, methodology): “The trend of a strong hardening of the energy spectra with increasing peak frequency already seen above 100MeV in the Fermi-LAT AGN catalogs (e.g., Ackermann et al. 2015) is even more pronounced above 10 GeV.”
• MOJAVE. XV. VLBA 15 GHz Total Intensity and Polarization Maps of 437 Parsec-scale AGN Jets from 1996 to 2017 (2017, background): “In 2013, a new hard spectrum MOJAVE sample of 132 AGNs was added, which had a declination of 20>- , a total 15 GHz VLBA flux density of 0.1> Jy, and a mean Fermi2LAC (Ackermann et al. 2011) or 3LAC catalog (Ackermann et al. 2015) spectral index harder than 2.1.”
• The Fermi blazar sequence (2017, background): “Sources with no multiple identifications and with no analysis issues (see §2 in Ackermann et al. 2015), form the “clean” sample that includes 414 FSRQs, 604 BL Lacs, 402 blazars of unknown type and 24 non–blazar AGNs.”
• Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “Right: photon index distribution of simulated blazars from the observed distribution of sources in the 3FGL catalog [327].”
• SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION IN RECENTLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY SATELLITES WITH FERMI-LAT (2016, methodology): “Assuming that the J-factors of the new systems can be measured with an uncertainty of 0.6 dex, the improvement in 12 sensitivity is a factor of ∼ 1.5 for hard annihilation spectra (e.g., the τ+τ− channel) compared to the median expected limits in Ackermann et al. (2015b).”