Bjet_MCMC: A New Tool to Automatically Fit the Broadband Spectral Energy Distributions of Blazars

• Published in: The Astrophysical journal 2024-02, Vol.962 (2), p.140
• Main Authors: Hervet, Olivier, Johnson, Caitlin A., Youngquist, Adrian
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Accretion disks; Astronomy data modeling; Astronomy software; Black holes; Blazars; Broadband; Emission analysis; Emissions; Field strength; Gamma-rays; Magnetic fields; Markov chain Monte Carlo; Markov chains; Supermassive black holes; Thermal environments
• ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad09c0

Multiwavelength observations are now the norm for studying blazars’ various states of activity, classifying them, and determining the possible underlying physical processes driving their emission. Broadband emission models became unavoidable tools for testing emission scenarios and setting the values of physical quantities such as the magnetic field strength, Doppler factor, or shape of the particle distribution of the emission zone(s). We announce here the first public release of a new tool, Bjet _ MCMC , that can automatically fit the broadband spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of blazars. The complete code is available on GitHub and allows for testing leptonic synchrotron self-Compton models with or without external inverse-Compton processes from the thermal environment of supermassive black holes (accretion disk and broad-line region). The code is designed to be user-friendly and computationally efficient. It contains a core written in C++ and a fully parallelized SED fitting method. The original multi-SSC zone model of Bjet is also available on GitHub but is not included in the Markov Chain Monte Carlo fitting process at the moment. We present the features, performance, and results of Bjet _ MCMC , as well as user advice.