Variability Modes of Blazars from Intensive Optical Monitoring

Abstract

We report the main results of our six year long intensive optical monitoring on blazars ON 231 (W Com), BL Lac, and 3C 273. Intensive optical monitoring is an indispensable tool to obtain well sampled light curves and thus to understand the correlation with the variability in other bands and to discriminate among the proposed emission models. The curves based on our work show different variability modes: intermittent mode, quasi-regular mode and mixed mode. It is not clear if different variability modes can be present, at various times, in the life of an object suggesting that their occurrence can be related to the evolution of blazars. An optimized and nearly continuous optical monitoring is the only way to know the activity status of the sources and to retrieve useful information on their physical dynamics. Also, the rapid availability of information about the luminosity of a source is very important to trigger space based observations and to activate large multifrequency collaborations. We stress that a significant sample of blazars can be observed with small size telescopes (0.35-0.80 cm) equipped with CCD cameras. A world-wide network of several instruments in different countries, is very useful to increase the time coverage and to reduce the number of nights lost for bad meteorological conditions.