Bibcode
Urry, C. M.; Pesce, J. E.; Falomo, R.; Scarpa, R.; Treves, A.; Giavalisco, M.
Referencia bibliográfica
American Astronomical Society, 188th AAS Meeting, #05.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 28, p.828
Advertised on:
5
1996
Número de citas
0
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
According to unified schemes for blazars, BL Lac objects are dominated
by relativistic jets pointing along the line of sight. Their
plane-of-the-sky counterparts are likely to be low-luminosity radio
galaxies, which are generally luminous ellipticals that lie
preferentially in clusters of galaxies. As part of a test of
unification, and in order to improve our understanding of BL Lac
objects, we are using the Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 to image a
complete sample of radio-selected BL Lac objects, having redshifts as
high as z ~ 1, at far better spatial resolution than is possible from
the ground. Our primary goals are to study the host galaxies and the
environments of these unusual AGN. The limiting factor in detecting host
galaxies is the subtraction of the bright nuclear light, which is
smeared by the point spread function (PSF) of the telescope. We have
employed a new observing technique, rolling the telescope between
images, that provides an additional means of estimating the PSF. Here we
present preliminary results for a subset of our sample objects,
including examples in and out of galaxy clusters.