Publication Date:
2017-01-02
Description:
In any flux-density limited sample of blazars, the distribution of the time-scale modulation factor t '/ t , which quantifies the change in observed time-scales compared to the rest-frame ones due to redshift and relativistic compression follows an exponential distribution with a mean depending on the flux limit of the sample. In this work, we produce the mathematical formalism that allows us to use this information in order to uncover the underlining rest-frame probability density function of measurable time-scales of blazar jets. We extensively test our proposed methodology using a simulated Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar population with a 1.5 Jy flux-density limit in the simple case (where all blazars share the same intrinsic time-scale), in order to identify limits of applicability and potential biases due to observational systematics and sample selection. We find that for monitoring with time intervals between observations longer than ~30 per cent of the intrinsic time-scale under investigation the method loses its ability to produce robust results. For time intervals of ~3 per cent of the intrinsic time-scale, the error of the method is as low as 1 per cent in recovering the intrinsic rest-frame time-scale. We applied our method to rotations of the optical polarization angle of blazars observed by RoboPol. We found that the intrinsic time-scales of the longest duration rotation event in each blazar follows a narrow distribution, well described by a normal distribution with mean 87 d and standard deviation 5 d. We discuss possible interpretations of this result.
Print ISSN:
0035-8711
Electronic ISSN:
1365-2966
Topics:
Physics
