# NEAR-INFRARED PHOTOMETRY OF BLAZARS

## 1 Introduction

The discovery that blazars (i.e., optically violently variable quasars and BL Lac objects) and flat radio-spectrum quasars emit most of their power in high-energy gamma rays (Fichtel, et al. 1994) probably represents one of the most surprising results from the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (CGRO). Their luminosity above 100 MeV in some cases exceeds 10<sup>48</sup> ergs s<sup>-1</sup> (assuming isotropic emission) and can be larger (by a factor of 10-100) than the luminosity in the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum. Blazars have smooth, rapidly variable, polarized continuum emission from radio through UV/X-ray wavelengths. All have compact flat-spectrum radio cores, and many exhibit superluminal motions.

A strong correlation between gamma-ray and near-infrared luminosities was recently discovered for a sample of blazars and it was suggested that this relation might be a common property of these objects (Xie et al. 1997). For that reason, they conclude that hot dust is likely to be the main source of the soft photons (near-infrared), which are continuously injected within the knot and then produce $`\gamma `$-ray flares by inverse Compton scattering on relativistic electrons.

The aim of the following observations was to search for an intraday or a day-to-day NIR variability in a sample of blazars. We expose the results of two consecutive days observation run.

## 2 Observations

We observed eight blazars with the 5-meter Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar during the nights of 25 and 26 February 1997, using the Cassegrain Infrared Camera, a $`256\times 256`$-pixel InSb array with the J (1.25 $`\mu `$m), H (1.65 $`\mu `$m) and K<sub>s</sub> (2.15$`\mu `$m) filters and a field-of-view of 32 arcsec.

The reduction of data was done under IRAF and included subtraction of the dark noise, flat field corrections, and combination of images to remove bad pixels, cosmic rays, and the sky. Then aperture photometry for each object was performed using nearby faint standards for calibration. The apparent magnitudes at Earth are summarized in Table 1.

With the possible exception of PKS 1156+295, no intraday or day-to-day variability was observed during these two nights. Due to the steadyness of the sources, it was possible to fit the data to a powerlaw (f(E) = C E) by a $`\chi ^2`$ minimization. We give the spectral index for each source in Table 1. Further discussion about the results can be found in Chapuis et al. (1998a,b).

###### Acknowledgements.

Observations at the Palomar Observatory were made as part of a continuing collaborative agreement between Palomar Observatory and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The research described in this paper was carried out in part by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.