Research on a 44 Day Quasi-periodic Oscillation of Optical Bands for BL Lac S5 0716+714

Abstract

By means of astronomical observation data from the 60 cm Telescope at Yunnan Observatory, optical data in the g, r, and i bands were collected for BL Lac S5 0716+714, spanning from 2017 November 10 to 2018 May 15. The original data set contains 21,396 quasi-simultaneous multiband points, with 7132 data points for each band. The Lomb–Scargle periodogram method and the weighted wavelet Z-transform method were used to search for a quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) signal in the data. For the first time, we report a QPO signal at 44 ± 6 days with a final significance of 3.98σ. Further analysis of the spectrum index reveals that the 44 day QPO signal is most likely explained by a helical motion of a blob with velocity β in the jet, where the viewing angle of the emission region in the jet undergoes periodic variations. In addition, we employed the hypothesis testing method (the null hypothesis) to analyze the flux distribution and determined that a double log-normal distribution provides a better fit; thus, there may be two radiative mini-regions within a jet in this source, so this 44 day QPO signal may be superimposed on a longer-term outburst.