A new method to unveil blazars among multi-wavelength counterparts of Unassociated Fermi gamma-ray Sources

Abstract

We discuss a new method for unveiling the possible blazar AGN nature among the numerous population of Unassociated Gamma-ray sources (UGS) in the Fermi catalogues. Our tool relies on positional correspondence of the Fermi object with X-ray sources (mostly from Swift-XRT), correlated with other radio, IR and optical data in the field. We built a set of Spectral Energy Distributions (SED) templates representative of the various blazar classes, and we quantitatively compared them to the observed multi-wavelength flux density data for all Swift-XRT sources found within the Fermi error-box, by taking advantage of some well-recognised regularities in the broad-band spectral properties of the objects. We tested the procedure by comparison with a few well-known blazars, and tested the chance for false positive recognition of UGS sources against known pulsars and other Galactic and extragalactic sources. Based on our spectral recognition tool, we find the blazar candidate counterparts for 14 2FGL UGSs among 183 selected at high galactic latitudes. Further our tool also allows us rough estimates of the redshift for the candidate blazar. In a few cases in which this has been possible (i.e. when the counterpart was a SDSS object), we verified that our estimate is consistent with the measured redshift. The estimated redshifts of the proposed UGS counterparts are larger, on average, than those of known Fermi blazars, a fact that might explain the lack of previous association or identification in published catalogues.Comment: 41 pages, 40 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in MNRA