Revealing High-z Fermi-LAT BL Lacs Using Swift and SARA Data with Photometric Analysis

Abstract

BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects are a subclass of blazar, distinguished by their featureless optical spectrum. The featureless spectrum presents a challenge in measuring the redshift of the BL Lacs. In this paper, we measure the redshift of BL Lacs using the photometric dropout technique. The space-based telescope Swift and the ground-based SARA telescopes are employed to provide magnitudes in the ${uvw}2,{uvm}2,{uvw}1,u,b,v,g^{\prime} ,r^{\prime} ,i^{\prime} ,{\rm{and}}\,z^{\prime} $ filters. We observe 60 BL Lacs and report reliable redshift upper limits for 41 of them. We discover three new high- z BL Lacs ( z > 1.3) at redshifts of ${1.74}_{-0.08}^{+0.05}$ , ${1.88}_{-0.03}^{+0.07}$ , and ${2.10}_{-0.04}^{+0.03}$ , bringing the number of high- z BL Lacs found by this method up to 19. Discussions are made on the implications for the blazar sequence, the Fermi blazar divide, and the gamma-ray horizon based on an analysis of the 4LAC catalog and all high- z BL Lacs found with the photo- z technique.

Keywords

• Blazars
• High energy astrophysics
• Active galactic nuclei
• BL Lacertae objects