Speaker
Description
Blazars are active galactic nuclei with jets aligned very closely to our line of sight. The optical emission of blazars is often dominated by the polarised, non-thermal emission arising in the jet, with an underlying unpolarised, thermal emission component arising from the host galaxy, dusty torus, and accretion disk components. As the emission of blazars varies between flaring/high states and quiescence, the strength of the thermal and non-thermal emission components changes. Coupled with multi-wavelength observations, optical spectropolarimetry during both flaring and quiescent states can be used to disentangle the polarised and unpolarised components in the spectral energy distributions of blazars, providing better constraints for the non-thermal particle distribution. To this end, spectropolarimetry observations of a large selection of blazars during different states of activity were taken with the Southern African Large Telescope using the RSS. For RSS spectropolarimetry observations, the reduction, wavelength calibration, and extraction of the spectrum and calculation of the polarisation, is performed using the Polsalt pipeline. In order to facilitate the blazar observations we have developed a supplementary pipeline to provide a more interactive approach to the wavelength calibration, and provide additional tools to improve accuracy of the wavelength calibration for the O&E beam. Here we present a brief overview of the pipeline and the results for the blazars 3C 279, and 4C+01.02.
| Track | AGN |
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