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Intra-night Optical Variability of Core Dominated Radio Quasars: the Role of Optical Polarization by Goyal, Arti; Gopal-Krishna; Wiita, Paul J.; Anupama, G. C.; Sahu, D. K.; Sagar, R.; Joshi, S. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Intra-night Optical Variability of Core Dominated Radio Quasars: the Role of Optical Polarization about?

{Abridged} Rapid variations in optical flux are seen in many quasars and all blazars. The amount of variability in different classes of Active Galactic Nuclei has been studied extensively but many questions remain unanswered. We present the results of a long-term programme to investigate the intra-night optical variability (INOV) of powerful flat spectrum radio core-dominated quasars (CDQs), with a focus on probing the relationship of INOV to the degree of optical polarization. We observed a sample of 16 bright CDQs showing strong broad optical emission lines and consisting of both high and low optical polarization quasars (HPCDQs and LPCDQs). We employed ARIES, IIA, IGO telescopes, to carry out {\it R}-band monitoring on a total of 47 nights. Combining these INOV data with those taken from the literature, we were able to increase the sample size to 21 CDQs(12 LPCDQs and 9 HPCDQs) monitored on a total of 73 nights. As the existence of a prominent flat-spectrum radio core signifies that strong relativistic beaming is present in all these CDQs, the definitions of the two sets differ primarily in fractional optical polarization, the LPCDQs showing a very low median$ P_{op} \simeq$ 0.4

Author

Goyal, Arti; Gopal-Krishna; Wiita, Paul J.; Anupama, G. C.; Sahu, D. K.; Sagar, R.; Joshi, S.

Published

2012

Language

EN