The Cosmic Evolution of Fermi BL Lacertae Objects

Understand

Fermi has provided the largest sample of gamma-ray selected blazars to date.

• In this work we use a uniformly selected set of 211 BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects detected by it Fermi during its first year of operation.
• We have obtained redshift constraints for 206 out of the 211 BL Lacs in our sample making it the largest and most complete sample of BL Lacs available in the literature.
• We use this sample to determine the luminosity function of BL Lacs and its evolution with cosmic time.