Statistical studies of spectral variability in blazars

Otero Santos, J.; Acosta-Pulido, J. A.; Becerra González, J.; Luashvili, A.
Bibliographical reference

Contributions to the XIV.0 Scientific Meeting (virtual) of the Spanish Astronomical Society

Advertised on:
7
2020
Number of authors
4
IAC number of authors
3
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Blazars are a subclass of Active Galactic Nuclei whose jets closely point to the Earth, characterized by a strong flux variability. These relativistic jets are the main contribution to their optical emission, however, it is possible that other regions of the source (e.g. the host galaxy or the accretion disk) contribute significantly to the emission in some cases. In such cases, all these components must be taken into account when studying the variability of the source. However, distinguishing among the different parts of the blazar is challenging due to the high dominance of the jet's emission. The objective of this work is to disentangle the contribution of each component of the blazar, in order to explain the spectral variability of the source and the contribution of each component to this variation. For this purpose, dimensionality reduction techniques, such as Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), are applied to decompose the spectra of the source and identify the different components present in the detected emission.