Classification of unassociated fermi-LAT sources

Abstract

The Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space telescope has detected 5788 sources in the 4FGL catalogue. Among them, 271 have been associated to pulsars, 3436 to blazars, and 1782 remain unassociated sources. Unassociated sources are object for which there is not a clear counterpart in other wavelengths. In this paper I investigated which are the parameters that can distinguish efficiently between pulsars and blazars among unassociated sources. I found that the most powerful parameters are the flux variability, power law index and latitude. Starting from these parameters, I have determined good cuts that disentangle pulsars from blazars. I have applied the cuts for the above cited parameters to the unassociated sources and determined that 142 of them are pulsars. The selection used in this paper can be applied to other sources to examine whether they are pulsars or blazars, which will contribute to the determination of the type of the newly detected sources

Keywords

• astrophysics
• data analysis
• pulsars