CGRaBS : an all-sky survey of gamma-ray blazar candidates

Creators: Healey, Stephen E.; Romani, Roger W.; Cotter, Garret; Michelson, Peter F.; Schlafly, Edward F.; Readhead, Anthony C. S.; Giommi, Paolo; Chaty, Sylvain; Grenier, Isabelle A.; Weintraub, Lawrence C.

Abstract

We describe a uniform all-sky survey of bright blazars, selected primarily by their flat radio spectra, that is designed to provide a large catalog of likely γ-ray active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The defined sample has 1625 targets with radio and X-ray properties similar to those of the EGRET blazars, spread uniformly across the |b| > 10° sky. We also report progress toward optical characterization of the sample; of objects with known R < 23, 85% have been classified and 81% have measured redshifts. One goal of this program is to focus attention on the most interesting (e.g., high-redshift, high-luminosity,...) sources for intensive multiwavelength study during the observations by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on GLAST.

Additional Information

© 2008. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2007 July 27; accepted 2007 September 1. S. E. H. was supported by SLAC under DOE contract DE-AC03-76SF00515. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. The HET is named in honor of its principal benefactors, William P. Hobby and Robert E. Eberly. The Marcario Low-Resolution Spectrograph is named for Mike Marcario of High Lonesome Optics, who fabricated several optics for the instrument but died before its completion. The LRS is a joint project of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope partnership and the Instituto de Astronomía de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. This paper includes data taken at the McDonald Observatory of the University of Texas at Austin. The data in this paper are based partly on observations obtained at the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, as part of a collaborative agreement between the California Institute of Technology, its divisions Caltech Optical Observatories and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (operated for NASA), and Cornell University. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Some of the data in this paper are based on observations made with ESO telescopes at the La Silla Observatory under program 077.B-0056(A) and ID 078.B-0275(B). Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS Web site is http://www.sdss.org/. The SDSS is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions. The Participating Institutions are the American Museum of Natural History, Astrophysical Institute Potsdam, University of Basel, University of Cambridge, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, Drexel University, Fermilab, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Japan Participation Group, the Johns Hopkins University, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, the Korean Scientist Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST), Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA), the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA), New Mexico State University, the Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the United States Naval Observatory, and the University of Washington. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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