Demographics of Blazars

Abstract

We discuss the preliminary results of an extensive effort to address the fundamental, and yet un-answered, question that can be trivialized as: ``are there more blue or red blazars?''. This problematic is tightly connected with the much debated issue of the unified picture(s) of radio-loud AGNs, which in turn revolves around the existence, and the properties of relativistic jets. We address this question by comparing -- simultaneously -- the properties of the collection of heterogeneously selected samples that are available now, with the predictions of a set of plausible unifications scenarios. We show that it is already possible to make significant progress even by using only the present samples. The important role of selection effects is discussed. For instance we show that the multiple flux selections typical of available surveys could induce some of the correlations found in color-color diagrams. These latter results should apply to any study of flux limited samples.