Browsing by Author "D'Abrusco, R."

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Extended X-Ray Emission around FR II Radio Galaxies: Hot Spots, Lobes, and Galaxy Clusters
    (2021) Jimenez-Gallardo, A.; Massaro, F.; Paggi, A.; D'Abrusco, R.; Prieto, M. A.; Pena-Herazo, H. A.; Berta, V; Ricci, F.; Stuardi, C.; Wilkes, B. J.; O'Dea, C. P.; Baum, S. A.; Kraft, R. P.; Forman, W. R.; Jones, C.; Mingo, B.; Liuzzo, E.; Balmaverde, B.; Capetti, A.; Missaglia, V; Hardcastle, M. J.; Baldi, R. D.; Morabito, L. K.
    We present a systematic analysis of the extended X-ray emission discovered around 35 FR II radio galaxies from the revised Third Cambridge Catalog (3CR) Chandra Snapshot Survey with redshifts between 0.05 and 0.9. We aimed to (i) test for the presence of extended X-ray emission around FR II radio galaxies, (ii) investigate whether the extended emission origin is due to inverse Compton (IC) scattering of seed photons arising from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) or thermal emission from an intracluster medium (ICM), and (iii) test the impact of this extended emission on hot-spot detection. We investigated the nature of the extended X-ray emission by studying its morphology and compared our results with low-frequency radio observations (i.e., similar to 150 MHz) in the TGSS and LOFAR archives, as well as with optical images from Pan-STARRS. In addition, we optimized a search for X-ray counterparts of hot spots in 3CR FR II radio galaxies. We found statistically significant extended emission (>3 sigma confidence level) along the radio axis of similar to 90% and in the perpendicular direction of similar to 60% of the galaxies in our sample. We confirmed the detection of seven hot spots in the 0.5-3 keV energy range. In the cases where the emission in the direction perpendicular to the radio axis is comparable to that along the radio axis, we suggest that the underlying radiative process is thermal emission from the ICM. Otherwise, the dominant radiative process is likely nonthermal IC/CMB emission from lobes. We found that nonthermal IC/CMB is the dominant process in similar to 70% of the sources in our sample, while thermal emission from the ICM dominates in similar to 15% of them.
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    Optical spectroscopic observations of gamma-ray blazar candidates. IX. Optical archival spectra and further observations from SOAR and OAGH
    (2019) Pena-Herazo, H.A.; Massaro, F.; Chavushyan, V.; Marchesini, E.J.; Paggi, A.; Landoni, M.; Masetti, N.; Ricci, Claudio; D'Abrusco, R.; Milisavljevic, D.; Jiménez-Bailón, E.; La Franca, F.; Smith, Howard A.; Tosti, G.
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    Optical spectroscopic observations of gamma-ray blazar candidates. X. Results from the 2018-2019 SOAR and OAN-SPM observations of blazar candidates of uncertain type
    (2020) de Menezes, R.; Amaya-Almazan, R. A.; Marchesini, E. J.; Pena-Herazo, H. A.; Massaro, F.; Chavushyan, V; Paggi, A.; Landoni, M.; Masetti, N.; Ricci, F.; D'Abrusco, R.; La Franca, F.; Smith, Howard A.; Milisavljevic, D.; Tosti, G.; Jimenez-Bailon, E.; Cheung, C. C.
    The fourth Fermi Large Area Telescope Source Catalog (4FGL) lists over 5000. -ray sources with statistical significance above 4s. About 23% of the sources listed in this catalog are unidentified/unassociated. -ray sources while 26% of the sources are classified as blazar candidates of uncertain type (BCUs), lacking optical spectroscopic information. To probe the blazar nature of candi- date counterparts of UGSs and BCUs, we started our optical spectroscopic follow up campaign in 2012, which up to date account for more than 350 observed sources. In this paper, the tenth of our campaign, we report on the spectroscopic observations of 37 sources, mostly BCUs, whose observations were carried out predominantly at the Observatorio Astronomico Nacional San Pedro Martir and the Southern Astrophysical Research Observatory between August 2018 and September 2019. We confirm the BL Lac nature of 27 sources and the flat spectrum radio quasar nature of three sources. The remaining ones are classified as six BL Lacs galaxy-dominated and one normal galaxy. We were also able to measure the redshifts for 20 sources, including 10 BL Lacs. As in previous analyses, the largest fraction of BCUs revealed to be BL Lac objects.
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    Optical spectroscopic observations of low-energy counterparts of Fermi-LAT ∼-ray sources
    (2020) Pena-Herazo, H. A.; Amaya-Almazan, R. A.; Massaro, F.; de Menezes, R.; Marchesini, E. J.; Chavushyan, V.; Paggi, A.; Landoni, M.; Masetti, N.; Ricci, F.; D'Abrusco, R.; Cheung, C. C.; La Franca, F.; Smith, H. A.; Milisavljevic, D.; Jimenez-Bailon, E.; Patino-Alvarez, V. M.; Tosti, G.
    Context. A significant fraction of all gamma-ray sources detected by the Large Area Telescope aboard the Fermi satellite is still lacking a low-energy counterpart. In addition, there is still a large population of gamma-ray sources with associated low-energy counterparts that lack firm classifications. In the last 10 years we have undertaken an optical spectroscopic campaign to address the problem of unassociated or unidentified gamma-ray sources (UGSs), mainly devoted to observing blazars and blazar candidates because they are the largest population of gamma-ray sources associated to date.Aims. Here we describe the overall impact of our optical spectroscopic campaign on sources associated in Fermi-LAT catalogs, coupled with objects found in the literature. In the literature search we kept track of efforts by different teams that presented optical spectra of counterparts or potential counterparts of Fermi-LAT catalog sources. Our summary includes an analysis of additional 30 newly collected optical spectra of counterparts or potential counterparts of Fermi-LAT sources of a previously unknown nature.Methods. New spectra were acquired at the Blanco 4 m and OAN-SPM 2.1 m telescopes, and those available in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (data release 15) archive.Results. All new sources with optical spectra analyzed here are classified as blazars. Thanks to our campaign, altogether we discovered and classified 394 targets with an additional 123 objects collected from a literature search. We began our optical spectroscopic campaign between the release of the second and third Fermi-LAT source catalogs (2FGL and 3FGL, respectively), classified about 25% of the sources that had uncertain nature and discovered a blazar-like potential counterpart for similar to 10% of UGSs listed therein. In the 4FGL catalog, about 350 Fermi-LAT sources have been classified to date thanks to our campaign.Conclusions. The most elusive class of blazars are found to be BL Lacs since the largest fraction of Fermi-LAT sources targeted in our observations showed a featureless optical spectrum. The same conclusion applied to the literature spectra. Finally, we confirm the high reliability of mid-IR color-based methods to select blazar-like candidate counterparts of unassociated or unidentified gamma-ray sources.
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    Properties of intra-cluster low-mass X-ray binaries in Fornax globular clusters
    (2022) Riccio, G.; Paolillo, M.; Cantiello, M.; D'Abrusco, R.; Jin, X.; Li, Z.; Puzia, T.; Mieske, S.; Prole, D. J.; Iodice, E.; D'Ago, G.; Gatto, M.; Spavone, M.
    Aims. We present a study of the intra-cluster population of low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXB) residing in globular clusters (GC) in the central 1 deg(2) of the Fornax galaxy cluster. Differently from previous studies, which were restricted to the innermost regions of individual galaxies, this work is aimed at comparing the properties of the intra-cluster population of GC-LMXBs with those of the host galaxy. Methods. The data used in this work are a combination of the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) and Chandra observations. We performed a cross-match between the optical and the X-ray catalogue in order to identify the LMXBs residing in GCs. We divided the GC-LMXBs into host-galaxy and intra-cluster objects based on their distance from the nearest galaxy in terms of effective radius (R-eff). We found 82 intra-cluster GC-LMXBs and 86 objects that are hosted in galaxies. As the formation of LMXBs also depends on the host GC colour, we performed a Gaussian mixture model to divide the population into red and blue GCs. Results. As has been found for the innermost regions of galaxies, LMXBs tend to form in red and bright GCs in intra-cluster space as well. We find, however, that the likelihood of a red GC to host an LMXB decreases with galactocentric distance, but it remains approximately constant for the blue GC population. Investigating the X-ray properties of the LMXBs residing in GCs, we find a difference in the X-ray luminosity function between the intra-cluster and host-galaxy sample: both follow a power-law down to similar to 8.5 x 10(37) erg s(-1), which is consistent with field LMXBs for the intra-cluster sample, while the latter agree with previous estimates for LMXBs in GCs. We observe a deficiency of bright LMXBs in blue intra-cluster GCs, however. This might indicate a lack of black hole binaries in metal-poor systems. We further investigated the spectral properties of the GC-LMXBs through their hardness-ratio. We detect a tentative difference in the hardness ratio of two populations, where the intra-cluster GC-LMXBs appear to have harder spectra than the host-galaxy objects. We find the same trend when we compare red and blue GC-LMXBs: the spectra of the blue sample are harder spectra than those of the red sample. This result could suggest a relation between the spectral properties of LMXBs and the host GC colour and therefore its metallicity. We discuss the possibilities of spatial biases due to uncertainties in the X-ray spectral response correction and due to contamination by background active galactic nuclei.