Correlation of Fermi Large Area Telescope sources with the 20-GHz Australia Telescope Compact Array radio survey

Abstract

We cross correlate the Fermi 11 months survey catalogue (1FGL) with the 20 GHz Australia Telescope Compact Array radio survey catalogue (AT20G) composed by 5890 sources at declination <0 deg. Among the 738 Fermi sources distributed in the southern sky we find 230 highly probable candidate counterparts in the AT20G survey. Of these, 222 are already classified as blazars (176 of known type and 46 of unknown optical class) in the Fermi 1-year LAT AGN Catalogue (1LAC) and 8 are new associations. By studying the gamma-ray and radio properties of these associations we find a strong correlation between the gamma-ray flux (above 100 MeV) and the 20 GHz flux density. This correlation is more than 3 sigma statistically significant both for the population of BL Lacs and of FSRQ considered separately. We also find that the radio counterparts associated to the Fermi sources have on average flat radio spectra between 5 and 20 GHz and that Fermi gamma-ray sources are not preferentially associated with "ultra inverted spectrum" radio sources. For 2 of the 8 new associations we build the broad band spectral energy distribution combining Fermi, Swift and radio observations. One of these two sources is identified with the high redshift FSRQ Swift J1656.3-3302 (z=2.4) and we classify the other source as a candidate new FSRQ. We also study the brightest radio source of the 46 associations without an optical classification and classify it as a new BL Lac candidate "twin" of the prototypical BL Lac OJ 287 if its redshift is somewhat larger, z~0.4.