Abstract

Two Swift programs are providing valuable, easily accessible, and automatically processed data to the community in near real-time. The first program is a long term monitoring program on Fermi blazars, as well as many other variable high energy sources, enabling multiwavelength campaigns, in-depth studies of flaring, and studies of long-term behavior. In the second program, we are using Swift to search for X-ray and UV/optical counterparts of unassociated Fermi gamma-ray sources, which are likely to be dominated by new gamma-ray blazars and may also harbor pulsars, as well as new exciting source classes.

This Swift program includes pointed observations, with typical durations of ~5 ks, of Fermi catalog sources with no currently known source association at other wavelengths. For each of the Fermi-LAT localization ellipses, Swift-XRT obtains accurate source positions (~5 arcsec) of any detected X-ray sources, enabling new blazar identification observations and pulsation searches at both radio and gamma-ray wavelengths. Together with follow-up at other wavelengths, this study aims to reveal the nature of these unassociated and unidentified gamma-ray sources. Some results from these programs will be presented, along with information about the public availability of the processed data in near real-time.