Temporal analysis of blazar flux is a powerful tool to draw inferences about the emission processes and physics of these sources. In the most general case, the available light curves are irregularly sampled and influenced by gaps, and in addition are also affected by correlated noise, making their analysis complicated. Gaussian processes may offer a viable tool to assess the statistical significance of proposed periods in light curves characterized by any sampling and noise pattern. We infer the significance of the periods proposed in the literature for two well known blazars with multiple claims of possible year-long periodicity: PG1553+113 and PKS2155-304, in the high-energy and optical bands. Adding a periodic component to the modeling gives a better statistical description of the analyzed light curves. The improvement is rather solid for PG1553+113, both at high energies and in the optical, while for PKS2155-304 at high energies the improvement is not yet strong enough to allow cogent claims, and no evidence for periodicity emerged by the analysis in the optical. Modeling a light curve by means of Gaussian processes, in spite of being relatively computationally demanding, allows us to derive a wealth of information about the data under study and suggests an original analysis framework for light curves of astrophysical interest.

中文翻译：

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用高斯过程观察 Blazar 光曲线周期

耀变体通量的时间分析是推断这些源的排放过程和物理学的有力工具。在最一般的情况下，可用的光变曲线是不规则采样的，受间隙影响，此外还受相关噪声的影响，使它们的分析变得复杂。高斯过程可以提供一种可行的工具来评估以任何采样和噪声模式为特征的光变曲线中提议周期的统计显着性。我们推断了文献中提出的两个众所周知的耀变体的周期的重要性，这些耀变体具有多种可能的长达一年的周期性：PG1553+113 和 PKS2155-304，在高能和光波段。在建模中添加周期性分量可以更好地统计分析所分析的光变曲线。PG1553+113 在高能和光学方面的改进相当稳固，而对于 PKS2155-304 在高能下的改进还不够强，不足以令人信服，并且在分析中没有出现周期性的证据。光学的。尽管计算量相对较高，但通过高斯过程模拟光变曲线使我们能够获得有关所研究数据的大量信息，并为具有天体物理学兴趣的光变曲线提出了原始分析框架。