Longterm Optical Monitoring of Bright BL Lacertae Objects with ATOM: Spectral Variability and Multiwavelength Correlations

Abstract

Blazars are the established sources of an intense and variable non-thermal radiation extending from radio wavelengths up to HE and VHE gamma-rays. Understanding the spectral evolution of blazars in selected frequency ranges, as well as multi-frequency correlations in various types of blazar sources, is of a primary importance for constraining the blazar physics. Here we present the results of a long-term optical monitoring of a sample of 30 blazars of the BL Lac type. We study the optical color-magnitude correlation patterns emerging in the analyzed sample, and compare the optical properties of the targets with the high-energy gamma-ray and high-frequency radio data. The optical observations were carried out in R and B filters using ATOM telescope. Each object was observed during at least 20 nights in the period 2007-2012. We find significant global color-magnitude correlations in 40 % of the sample. The sources which do not display any clear chromatism often do exhibit bluer-when-brighter (bwb) behavior but only in isolated shorter time intervals. We also discovered spectral state transitions at optical wavelengths in several sources. Finally, we find that the radio, optical, and gamma-ray luminosities of the sources obey almost linear correlations, which seem however induced, at least partly, by the redshift dependance, and may be also affected by non-simultaneousness of the analyzed dataset. We argue that the observed bwb behavior is intrinsic to the jet emission regions, at least for some of the analyzed blazars, rather than resulting from the contamination of the measured flux by the starlight of host galaxies. We also conclude that the significance of color-magnitude scalings does not correlate with the optical color, but instead seems to depend on the source luminosity, in a sense that these are the lowest-luminosity BL Lac objects which display the strongest correlations.