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Article

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Disciplines

Astrophysics and Astronomy

Publication Details

Published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics in the section Extragalactic Astronomy.

Raiteri, C.M. et al., A&A, 491., 755-766, 2008, reproduced with permission, © ESO

This work is partly based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, operated on the island of La Palma jointly by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, and on observations collected at the German-Spanish Calar Alto Observatory, jointly operated by the MPIA and the IAA-CSIC. AZT-24 observations are made within an agreement between Pulkovo, Rome and Teramo observatories. The Submillimeter Array is a joint project between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics and is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the Academia Sinica. This research has made use of data from the University of Michigan Radio Astronomy Observatory, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and by funds from the University of Michigan. The Metsähovi team acknowledges the support from the Academy of Finland. This work is partly based on observation from Medicina and Noto telescopes operated by INAF – Istituto di Radioastronomia and the 100-m telescope of the MPIfR (Max-Planck-Institut fr Radioastronomie) at Effelsberg. The Torino team acknowledges financial support by the Italian Space Agency through contract ASI-INAF I/088/06/0 for the Study of High-Energy Astrophysics. Acquisition of the MAPCAT data at the Calar Alto Observatory is supported in part by the Spanish “Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación” through grant AYA2007-67626-C03-03. This paper is partly based on observations carried out at the IRAM 30-m telescope. IRAM is supported by INSU/CNRS (France), MPG (Germany) and IGN (Spain).

Abstract

Aims: The Whole Earth Blazar Telescope (WEBT) consortium has been monitoring the blazar 3C 454.3 from the radio to the optical bands since 2004 to study its emission variability properties.

Methods: We present and analyse the multifrequency results of the 2007-2008 observing season, including XMM-Newton observations and near-IR spectroscopic monitoring, and compare the recent emission behaviour with the past one. The historical mm light curve is presented here for the first time.

Results: In the optical band we observed a multi-peak outburst in July-August 2007, and other faster events in November 2007-February 2008. During these outburst phases, several episodes of intranight variability were detected. A mm outburst was observed starting from mid 2007, whose rising phase was contemporaneous to the optical brightening. A slower flux increase also affected the higher radio frequencies, the flux enhancement disappearing below 8 GHz. The analysis of the optical-radio correlation and time delays, as well as the behaviour of the mm light curve, confirm our previous predictions, suggesting that changes in the jet orientation likely occurred in the last few years. The historical multiwavelength behaviour indicates that a significant variation in the viewing angle may have happened around year 2000. Colour analysis confirms a general redder-when-brighter trend, which reaches a “saturation” at R ~ 14 and possibly turns into a bluer-when-brighter trend in bright states. This behaviour is due to the interplay of different emission components, the synchrotron one possibly being characterised by an intrinsically variable spectrum. All the near-IR spectra show a prominent Hα emission line (EWobs = 50-120 Å), whose flux appears nearly constant, indicating that the broad line region is not affected by the jet emission. We show the broad-band SEDs corresponding to the epochs of the XMM-Newton pointings and compare them to those obtained at other epochs, when the source was in different brightness states. A double power-law fit to the EPIC spectra including extra absorption suggests that the soft-X-ray spectrum is concave, and that the curvature becomes more pronounced as the flux decreases. This connects fairly well with the UV excess, which becomes more prominent with decreasing flux. The most obvious interpretation implies that, as the beamed synchrotron radiation from the jet dims, we can see both the head and the tail of the big blue bump. The X-ray flux correlates with the optical flux, suggesting that in the inverse-Compton process either the seed photons are synchrotron photons at IR-optical frequencies or the relativistic electrons are those that produce the optical synchrotron emission. The X-ray radiation would thus be produced in the jet region from where the IR-optical emission comes.

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