Hunting for the candidates of Changing-Look Blazar using Mclust Clustering Analysis

TL;DR

This study uses Gaussian Mixture Modeling to identify 111 candidate changing-look blazars from a large dataset, including 67 newly proposed candidates, enhancing understanding of blazar state transitions.

Contribution

It applies Mclust clustering analysis to classify blazars and identify new changing-look blazar candidates, expanding the known sample and insights into their physical properties.

Findings

Identified 111 candidate changing-look blazars, including 67 new candidates.

Found 4 data subsets with high clustering consistency (ARI > 0.610).

Confirmed 44 previously known CLBs among the candidates.

Abstract

The changing-look blazars (CLBs) are the blazars that their optical spectral lines at different epochs show a significant changes and present a clear transition between the standard FSRQ and BL Lac types. The changing-look phenomena in blazars are highly significant for enhancing our understanding of certain physical problems of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), such as the potential mechanism of the state transition in the accretion process of the supermassive black holes in the central engine of AGNs, the possible intrinsic variation of the jet, and the connection between the accretion disk and the jet. Currently, the CLBs reported in the literature are still rare astronomical objects. In our previous work, we found that there are 8 physical properties parameters of CLBs located between those of FSRQs and those of BL Lacs. In order to search more CLB candidates (CLBCs), we employed the $mclust$ Gaussian Mixture Modelling clustering algorithm to perform clustering analysis for the 255 subsets of the 8 physical properties parameters with 2250 blazars from the 4FGL-DR3. We find that there are 29 subsets with 3 groups (corresponding to bl lacs, fsrqs, and CLBCs), in which there are 4 subsets with the adjusted Rand index greater then 0.610 (ARI $>$ 0.610). The combined clustering results from 4 subsets report that there are 111 CLBCs that includes 44 CLBs reported in previous literature and 67 new CLBCs, where 11 CLBCs labeled as BL Lac and 56 CLBCs labeled as FSRQ in 4FGL catalog.