The Open Universe VOU-Blazars tool

Abstract Context: Blazars are a remarkable type of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) that are playing an important and rapidly growing role in today’s multi-frequency and multi-messenger astrophysics. In the past several years, blazars have been discovered in relatively large numbers in radio, microwave, X-ray and γ -ray surveys, and more recently have been associated to high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and possibly to ultra-high energy cosmic rays. Blazars are expected to dominate the high-energy extragalactic sky that will soon be surveyed by the new generation of very high-energy γ -ray observatories such as CTA. In parallel to the discovery of many blazars at all frequencies, the technological evolution, together with the increasing adoption of open data policies, is causing an exponential growth of astronomical data that is freely available through the network of Virtual Observatories (VO) and the web in general, providing an unprecedented potential for multi-wavelength and multi-messenger data analysis. Product: We present VOU-Blazars, a tool developed within the Open Universe initiative that has been designed to facilitate the discovery of blazars and build their spectral energy distributions (SED) using public multi-wavelength photometric and spectral data that are accessible through VO services. The tool is available as source code, as a Docker container, and as a web-based service accessible within the Open Universe portal. Methods: VOU-Blazars implements a heuristic approach based on the well known SED that differentiate blazars from other astronomical sources. The VOU-Blazars outputs are flux tables, bibliographic references, sky plots and SEDs. Results: This paper describes the working mechanism of the tool, gives details of the catalogues and on-line services that are used to produce the output, and gives some examples of usage. VOU-Blazars has been extensively tested during the selection of new high-energy peaked (HSP) blazars recently published in the 3HSP catalog, and has been used to search for blazar counterparts of Fermi 3FHL, Fermi 4FGL, AGILE γ -ray sources, and of IceCube astrophysical neutrinos.