Blazar Radio and Optical Survey (BROS): A catalog of blazar candidates showing flat radio spectrum and their optical identification in Pan-STARRS1 Surveys

TL;DR

The BROS catalog provides a comprehensive list of blazar candidates with flat radio spectra and optical IDs, revealing two distinct populations and including previously missed elliptical-like objects, aiding high-energy astrophysics research.

Contribution

This work presents a new, extensive blazar candidate catalog with lower flux thresholds, identifying two populations and including elliptical-like sources missed by previous surveys.

Findings

Identification of two distinct blazar populations in color-magnitude space.

Discovery of a previously missed elliptical-like blazar population.

The catalog's potential for high-energy astrophysics applications.

Abstract

Utilizing the latest and the most sensitive radio and optical catalogs, we completed a new blazar candidate catalog, Blazar Radio and Optical Survey (BROS), which includes 88,211 sources located at declination $\delta > -40^{\circ}$ and outside the galactic plane ($|b| > 10^{\circ}$). We list compact flat-spectrum radio sources of $\alpha > -0.6$ ($\alpha$ is defined as $F_{\nu} \propto \nu^\alpha$ ) from 0.15~GHz TGSS and 1.4~GHz NVSS catalogs. We further identify optical counterparts of the selected sources by cross-matching with Pan-STARRS1 photometric data. Color-color and color-magnitude plots for the selected BROS sources clearly show two distinct populations, An "quasar-like" population consisting of both flat-spectrum radio quasars and BL Lac type objects. On the other hand, an "elliptical-like" population of mostly BL Lac-type objects is buried in the elliptical galaxy. We emphasize that the latter population is missed by previous catalogs but newly emerged in the present BROS catalog, due to the lower radio flux threshold of our selection. Model calculations show that the "elliptical-like" population consists of elliptical galaxies located at redshift z $\lesssim$ 0.5, which is also supported by the logN-logS distribution of the power-law index of $1.49 \pm 0.05$. This BROS catalog is useful for identifying the electromagnetic counterparts of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and PeV neutrinos recently detected by IceCube, as well as nearby BL Lac objects detectable by future high sensitivity TeV telescopes, such as Cherenkov Telescope Array.