The Third Catalog of Active Galactic Nuclei Detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope

Ackermann, M. and Ajello, M. and Atwood, W. B. and Baldini, L. and Ballet, J. and Barbiellini, G. and Bastieri, D. and Becerra, Gonzalez J. and Bellazzini, R. and Bissaldi, E. and Blandford, R. D. and Bloom, E. D. and Bonino, R. and Bottacini, E. and Brandt, T. J. and Bregeon, J. and Britto, R. J. and Bruel, P. and Buehler, R. and Buson, S. and Caliandro, G. A. and Cameron, R. A. and Caragiulo, M. and Caraveo, P. A. and Carpenter, B. and Casandjian, J. M. and Cavazzuti, E. and Cecchi, C. and Charles, E. and Chekhtman, A. and Ohno, Masanori (2015) The Third Catalog of Active Galactic Nuclei Detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope. ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 810 (1). ISSN 1538-4357

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Abstract

The third catalog of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) detected by the Fermi-LAT (3LAC) is presented. It is based on the third Fermi-LAT catalog (3FGL) of sources detected between 100 MeV and 300 GeV with a Test Statistic (T S) greater than 25, between 2008 August 4 and 2012 July 31. The 3LAC includes 1591 AGNs located at high Galactic latitudes (|b| > 10◦), a 71% increase over the second catalog based on 2 years of data. There are 28 duplicate associations, thus 1563 of the 2192 high-latitude gamma-ray sources of the 3FGL catalog are AGNs. Most of them (98%) are blazars. About half of the newly detected blazars are of unknown type, i.e., they lack spec- troscopic information of sufficient quality to determine the strength of their emission lines. Based on their gamma-ray spectral properties, these sources are evenly split be- tween flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and BL Lacs. The most abundant detected BL Lacs are of the high-synchrotron-peaked (HSP) type. About 50% of the BL Lacs have no measured redshifts. A few new rare outliers (HSP-FSRQs and high-luminosity HSP BL Lacs) are reported. The general properties of the 3LAC sample confirm previ- ous findings from earlier catalogs. The fraction of 3LAC blazars in the total population of blazars listed in BZCAT remains non-negligible even at the faint ends of the BZCAT- blazar radio, optical and X-ray flux distributions, which is a clue that even the faintest known blazars could eventually shine in gamma rays at LAT-detection levels. The energy-flux distributions of the different blazar populations are in good agreement with extrapolation from earlier catalogs.

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