Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter eROSITA

Wednesday, 14 September 2022, 14:56   (SFG 0140 / virtual eROSITA)

The eROSITA blazar sky

Steven Hämmerich (1), Andrea Gokus (1), Aafia Zainab (1), Werner Collmar (2), Joern Wilms (1), Mirko Krumpe (3), David Homan (3), Sabina Bahic (3), Alex Markowitz (4)
1) Dr. Karl Remeis Sternwarte Bamberg & ECAP (FAU), 2) Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, 3) Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam, 4) Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center, Polish Academy of Sciences

Blazars are radio-loud active galactic nuclei, with jets that are closely aligned with the line-of-sight. These sources are highly variable on all time-scales across the electromagnetic spectrum. While being well monitored and studied at different wavelengths, such as radio- and gamma-wavelengths, monitoring capabilities and systematic large scale studies in the X-rays are very limited. The eROSITA instrument, however, provides an excellent opportunity to study a large sample of blazars and blazar candidates in an unbiased and systematic way. Additionally, it is possible to study the variability between scans. We cross-match eROSITA data from both the eROSITA final equatorial depth survey (eFEDS) and the first eROSITA all-sky survey (eRASS1) with catalogs containing known blazars and blazar candidates and identify roughly 8000 individual eROSITA sources within 15 arcsec of these positions. We collect information on these sources from other wavelength ranges mainly focusing on the radio and gamma bands, and other fundamental parameters such as redshifts. We will present the X-ray properties of the blazar- and candidate-population as seen by eROSITA during eFEDS and eRASS1 and how these properties relate to those at other wavelengths. This study lays the foundation for exploiting other all-sky scans of eROSITA and studying the variability of blazars in the X-rays.