OU for Blazars

Open Universe for blazars

Open Universe for blazars is a programme, developed as part of the Open Universe Initiative (Giommi et al. 2018), that is designed to process existing open access low/medium level astronomy data using innovative data analysis methods, to generate high-transparency multi-frequency data products that are ready to use for blazar science.

"Open Universe" is an initiative proposed by Italy to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in 2016 that is now actively developed by a number of countries (Italy, Brazil, Armenia, and Argentina) and international scientific institutions, in coordination with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA). Its main goal is to contribute for astronomy and space science data to become more openly available, easily discoverable, free of bureaucratic, administrative or technical barriers, and therefore usable by the widest possible community, from professional researchers, to all people interested in space science. An Open Universe web portal for enhanced data access, has been developed at the Italian Space Agency, ASI.

For this project we use a Blazar reference list including 5340 objects

assembled by combining the 5BZCAT, the 3HSP, and the 3LAC catalogs. This list will be regularly updated as new catalogs are published and additional blazars are reported.

The first paper of this programme is dedicated to the analysis of all Swift-XRT X-ray images including a blazar the Swift_deepsky software, a data analysis pipeline based on the official HEASoft-XRTDAS-XIMAGE software packages encapsulated into a Docker container,that can run on Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems. The Swift_deepsky container is available here

Submitted to Astronomy and Astrophysics

The catalogs in different formats and the spectral/timing high-transparency data products can be accessed in a variety of ways, as detailed below:

Catalogs fits files
- Main catalog (all blazars observed by Swift-XRT in PC mode, one week-integration)
- Selected blazars monitored on a daily basis
Catalogs csv files
- Main catalog (all blazars observed by Swift-XRT in PC mode, one week-integration)
- Selected blazars monitored on a daily basis
On-line query interface at the Brazilian Science Data Center, BSDC

Data integrated in the VOU-Blazars, VOU-SED and SSDC-SED tools accesible from the openuniverse.asi.it portal or as standalone tools (VOU-BLazars, Docker container version, VOU-Blazars, source code, SSDC-SED Builder).

Access via Virtual Observatory Simple Conesearch Service (SCS) (e.g. from TOPCAT, Aladin etc...).

Activities planned for the near future

Issue of a new version of VOU_Blazar tool and of the associated technical paper

Swift XRT spectra (PC and WT mode) of bright blazars using XSPEC.
See Giommi (2015) for a description and some preliminary results.

Nustar spectra of bright blazars

Fermi-LAT adaptive-bin light curves of selected blazars

SED movies of bright and densely observed blazars

Last update 4-Apr-2019