Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• PAVLIDOU, V
• RICHARDS, J. L
• ZENSUS, J. A
• GIROLETTI, M
• REIMER, A
• HEALEY, S. E
• ROMANI, R. W
• SHAW, M. S
• MAX-MOERBECK, W
• KING, O. G
• PARSON, T. J
• READHEAD, A. C. S
• REEVES, R
• STEVENSON, M. A
• ANGELAKIS, E
• FUHRMANN, L

Titel

ASSESSING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF APPARENT CORRELATIONS BETWEEN RADIO AND GAMMA-RAY BLAZAR FLUXES

Ist Teil von

• The Astrophysical journal, 2012-06, Vol.751 (2), p.1-13

Ort / Verlag

Bristol: IOP

Erscheinungsjahr

2012

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Whether or not a correlation exists between the radio and gamma-ray flux densities of blazars is a long-standing question, and one that is difficult to answer confidently because of various observational biases, which may either dilute or apparently enhance any intrinsic correlation between radio and gamma-ray luminosities. The novelty of the method lies in a combination of data randomization in luminosity space (to ensure that the randomized data are intrinsically, and not just apparently, uncorrelated) and significance assessment in flux space (to explicitly avoid Malmquist bias and automatically account for the limited dynamical range in both frequencies). We show that for a smaller number of redshift bins, the method yields a worse significance, and in this way it is conservative: although it may fail to confirm an existing intrinsic correlation in a small sample that cannot be split into many redshift bins, it will not assign a stronger, artificially enhanced significance.