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Gaia Sees Blazars Move: Locating Optical Flares Using Astrometry

  • Authors: A. V. Plavin

A. V. Plavin 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1006 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 7.

Predicted per-epoch centroid positions for J1058+0133 (left) and J1824+5651 (right), illustrating the signal expected from Gaia DR4 per-epoch astrometry. Top: Gaia light curves analogous to the left panels of Figure 3, with the linear trend in inverse flux. Bottom panels: centroid position along the jet predicted at each photometric epoch (black points) compared with the DR3 linear proper motion (blue line). The epoch-by-epoch excursions—driven by flux variability—illustrate the underlying signal that DR4 per-epoch astrometry will probe. Uncertainties of individual Gaia measurements are expected to be comparable to these excursions, implying that the correlation signal will only be visible in the aggregate.

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