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Description
Nearly one-third of the {gamma}-ray sources detected by Fermi are still unidentified, despite significant recent progress in this area. However, all of the {gamma}-ray extragalactic sources associated in the second Fermi-LAT catalog have a radio counterpart. Motivated by this observational evidence, we investigate all the radio sources of the major radio surveys that lie within the positional uncertainty region of the unidentified {gamma}-ray sources (UGSs) at a 95% level of confidence. First, we search for their infrared counterparts in the all-sky survey performed by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and then we analyze their IR colors in comparison with those of the known {gamma}-ray blazars. We propose a new approach, on the basis of a two-dimensional kernel density estimation technique in the single [3.4]-[4.6]-[12]{mu}m WISE color-color plot, replacing the constraint imposed in our previous investigations on the detection at 22{mu}m of each potential IR counterpart of the UGSs with associated radio emission. The main goal of this analysis is to find distant {gamma}-ray blazar candidates that, being too faint at 22{mu}m, are not detected by WISE and thus are not selected by our purely IR-based methods. We find 55 UGSs that likely correspond to radio sources with blazar-like IR signatures. An additional 11 UGSs that have blazar-like IR colors have been found within the sample of sources found with deep recent Australia Telescope Compact Array observations.
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