Research Projects

The study investigates the intranight variability and polarization properties of low-mass AGN (LMAGN) and high-z blazars. The prevailing paradigm suggests that powerful relativistic jets are produced by supermassive black holes, but recent studies have confirmed the presence of relativistic jets in radio-loud Narrow-line seyfert1 galaxies. Gopal-Krishna et al. (2023) studied the intranight optical variability (INOV) properties of 12 X-ray and radio-detected LMAGN with masses close to 10^6 M⊙. They found blazar-like INOV activity, suggesting the set of 12 LMAGN contains relativistic non-thermal jets. This proposal aims to confirm this finding through intranight optical monitoring of an independent sample of six low-mass AGN. The optical polarization (popt) is also used to identify the blazar state, which is greater than 3%). The study also aims to confirm the existence of a secondary population of relativistic particles for non-thermal UV radiation, based on the optical photometric analysis of nine low-polarization high-z flat-spectrum radio quasars (LPFsRQs) and five high-polarization FsRQs (HPFsRQs).