Multi-wavelength characterization of Fermi blazars of uncertain type

Abstract

One of the major challenges in the research of jetted active galactic nuclei (AGN) is the completeness of the source catalogs released using the c-ray data taken from the Fermi-large area telescope (LAT). There are about 30% of the Fermi-LAT detected blazars whose classification is yet to be ascer tained, so-called blazars candidates of uncertain (BCU) type, thereby hampering the attempts made to explore the problems associated with relativistic jets. Using the results obtained in a recent study focused on the optical spectroscopic and multi-band properties of a large sample of Fermi blazars, this work classifies 57 BCUs presents in the fourth catalog of the Fermi-LAT detected AGN as flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and 96 as BL Lac type sources. In the c-ray luminosity versus c-ray photon index plane, these newly classified blazars occupy regions populated by their known counterparts. The Compton dominance and accretion luminosity normalized by the Eddington one, for BCUs appear to follow the positive corre lation already identified for known blazars. These observations suggest that Compton dominance can be used as a proxy for the accretion rate, thus supporting the Compton dominance-based blazar classification scheme.