When we first became interested in Microvariability, we thought an interesting things to do would to see if the intermittent microvariations were correlated with any other source parameters. Others had already looked into the differences between radio-quiet and radio loud quasars, so we restricted ourselves to the subset of Blazars, radio loud quasars and BL Lacertae objects. We think that we only see the jet emission, and the disk emission is faint, so the microvariations must be from processes in the jet itself in these sources. Our idea was to correlate the longer-term brightness variations (outbursts) with the intraday variations (microvariations). We originally looked at 4 sources and found that there was no correlation between the brightness of the source and the appearance of microvariations (Howard et al 2003). However our ststistics were poor, and we needed many more observations before we could say anything concrete. Thus we applied and received an NSF grant to investigate these potential correlations. We needed to observe object over their entire brightness range, during outbursts, and during faint periods of relative inactivity. And we needed to do many sources. The table below shows the results of the correlations study between brightness and the detection of microvariability in our source list.
| Name | # of Observations | Micro Yes | Micro No | Correlation Coeff. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AO 0235+164 | 9 | 5 | 4 | -0.04 |
| 0420-01 | 9 | 5 | 4 | -0.45 |
| S1 0716+71 | 17 | 15 | 2 | -0.26 |
| OJ 287 | 13 | 10 | 3 | -0.15 |
| 3C 279 | 8 | 6 | 2 | +0.04 |
| 3C 345 | 5 | 3 | 2 | +0.56 |
| 3C 454.3 | 6 | 4 | 2 | +0.12 |
| BL Lac | 21 | 14 | 7 | -0.12 |