Characterizing the optical nature of the blazar S5 1803+784 during its 2020 flare

TL;DR

This study presents a detailed optical monitoring of blazar S5 1803+784 during its 2020 flare, revealing variability, spectral changes, and jet-dominated emission with no significant periodicity.

Contribution

First comprehensive optical variability and spectral analysis of S5 1803+784 during its 2020 flare, including intraday variability, spectral energy distribution, and color-magnitude trends.

Findings

Detected the brightest and faintest states of the source.

Found significant intraday variability on 2 nights.

Observed a mild bluer-when-brighter trend, stronger during the flare.

Abstract

We report the results from our study of the blazar S5 1803+784 carried out using the quasi-simultaneous $B$, $V$, $R$, and $I$ observations from May 2020 to July 2021 on 122 nights. Our observing campaign detected the historically bright optical flare during MJD 59063.5$-$MJD 59120.5. We also found the source in its brightest ($R_{mag}$= 13.617) and faintest ($R_{mag}$= 15.888) states till date. On 13 nights, covering both flaring and non-flaring periods, we searched for the intraday variability using the power-enhanced $F-$test and the nested ANOVA test. We found significant variability in 2 out of these 13 nights. However, no such variability was detected during the flaring period. From the correlation analysis, we observed that the emission in all optical bands were strongly correlated with a time lag of $\sim$ 0 days. To get insights into its dominant emission mechanisms, we generated the optical spectral energy distributions of the source on 79 nights and estimated the spectral indices by fitting the simple power law. Spectral index varied from 1.392 to 1.911 and showed significant variations with time and $R-$band magnitude. We have detected a mild bluer-when-brighter trend (BWB) during the whole monitoring period while a much stronger BWB trend during the flare. We also carried out a periodicity search using four different methods and found no significant periodicity during our observation duration. Based on the analysis during the flaring state of the source one can say that the emissions most likely originate from the jet rather than the accretion disk.