P. Padovani, P. Giommi, A. Rau
We study the quasi-simultaneous near-IR, optical, UV, and X-ray photometry of
eleven gamma-ray selected blazars for which redshift estimates larger than 1.2
have been recently provided. Four of these objects turn out to be high-power
blazars with the peak of their synchrotron emission between ~ 3 x 10^15 and ~
10^16 Hz, and therefore of a kind predicted to exist but never seen before.
This discovery has important implications for our understanding of physical
processes in blazars, including the so-called "blazar sequence", and might also
help constraining the extragalactic background light through gamma-ray
absorption since two sources are strongly detected even in the 10 - 100 GeV
Fermi-LAT band. Based on our previous work and their high powers, these sources
are very likely high-redshift flat-spectrum radio quasars with their emission
lines swamped by the non-thermal continuum.
View original:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.2236
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