Ponente
Descripción
Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei in which the relativistic jet-component aligns closely with the observer’s line of sight. Due to this viewing geometry, the observed emission is dominated by the highly Doppler boosted non-thermal jet emission which originates from the jet. At optical/UV wavelengths the emission is produced by leptonic synchrotron emission from relativistic electrons in the jet, with an underlying thermal contribution to the emission arising from the accretion disc, broad-line region, dust torus, and host galaxy itself. Polarization measurements at optical wavelengths provide an important diagnostic by which to disentangle the polarized non-thermal emission from the thermal (unpolarized) contribution, placing better constraints on the underlying non-thermal population. In 2023 November a long-term monitoring campaign was launched to perform Spectro-Polarimetric Observations of TeV sources (SPOTS), using the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT). The current sample consists of 12 HBLs and 2 FSRQs. The SPOTS project aims to find trends in the spectropolarimetric behaviour of TeV blazars, and how it connects to the high energy emission. During the observing period none of the blazars showed significant flaring at gamma-ray energies and we present here the results from the first two years of observations, considering the sources in the quiescent state. This will be used to investigate the nature and evolution of their jets, modelling their polarization and SEDs, and will be compared to previous surveys.
