Two Swift Public Monitoring Programs on Fermi Blazars and Fermi Unassociated Sources
Abstract
Two Swift programs are providing valuable, easily accessible, and automatically processed data to the community in near real-time. The first program is a long term monitoring program on Fermi blazars, as well as many other variable high energy sources, enabling multiwavelength campaigns, in-depth studies of flaring, and studies of long-term behavior. In the second program, we are using Swift to search for X-ray and UV/optical counterparts of unassociated Fermi gamma-ray sources, which are likely to be dominated by new gamma-ray blazars and may also harbor pulsars, as well as new exciting source classes. This Swift program includes pointed observations, with typical durations of ~4 ks, of Fermi catalog sources with no currently known source association at other wavelengths. For each of the Fermi-LAT localization ellipses, Swift-XRT obtains accurate source positions 5 arcsec) of any detected X-ray sources, enabling new blazar identification observations and pulsation searches at both radio and gamma-ray wavelengths. Together with follow-up at other wavelengths, this study aims to reveal the nature of these unassociated and unidentified gamma-ray sources. Some results from these programs will be presented, along with information about the public availability of the processed data in near real-time.
- Publication:
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AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #13
- Pub Date:
- April 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013HEAD...1311407F