Scientific Seminars

Four decades of blazar radio monitoring - what have we learned?

Merja Tornikoski
Aalto University, Metsähovi radio observatory

2020-01-23    11:00    Merate - Biblioteca

I will present the ongoing blazar monitoring programme and other AGN observing projects of Aalto University Metsähovi Radio Observatory (MRO) in Finland. MRO has been operational for more than 40 years now, and even though there have been some periods of struggle with funding cuts, our streamlined operations and flexibility have always allowed for a multitude of different kinds of observing projects. Also, our observatory's future prospects include some major upgrades, hopefully securing our operations for the next decades, too. The backbone of our observing programme is the dense, long term monitoring of approximately one hundred blazars at 37 GHz (and somewhat less at 22 GHz). But in addition to that, we carry out also many other AGN observing projects, trying to optimally use the observing time between the core monitoring sample, some "high-risk" projects involving faint sources or large samples, as well as Target-of-Opportunity projects that call for a quick response. In the recent years the focus of our research projects has ranged from sources of the Planck satellite's extragalactic foreground source programme to Fermi-detected flaring blazars. Currently we are also observing samples of younger radio sources, such as Gigahertz Peaked Spectrum sources and Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 galaxies. I will describe our observing programmes and the science goals which ultimately aim for a better understanding of blazar activity, unification and evolution.