Related papers: The Blazar Spectral Sequence and GLAST
Blazars are active galactic nuclei with relativistic jets pointed almost directly at Earth. Blazars are characterized by strong, apparently stochastic flux variability at virtually all observed wavelengths and timescales, from minutes to…
TeV emission can be a common characteristic of low power blazars. This is in line with the sequence of blazars relating the observed bolometric luminosity with their overall spectral energy distribution. Detecting new TeV blazars, possibly…
The spectral properties of blazars seem to follow a phenomenological sequence according to the source luminosity. By inferring the source physical parameters through (necessarily) modeling the blazar spectra, we have previously proposed…
Since 2002, the number of detected blazars at E_\gamma > 100 GeV has more than doubled. I study all currently known BL Lac-type objects with published energy spectra. Their intrinsic energy spectra are reconstructed by removing…
As an overview of blazar research, we briefly discuss some of the themes of this conference, including the various types of blazars, blazar samples and selection effects, unified schemes, evolution, and jet physics.
Blazars are the brightest and most abundant persistent sources in the extragalactic gamma-ray sky. Due to their significance, they are often observed across various energy bands to explore potential correlations between emissions at…
The average Spectral Energy Distributions (SED) of different classes of blazars from the radio to the gamma-ray band are studied adopting a "complete-sample" approach. The SED are globally similar, despite systematic differences in specific…
The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is an observatory designed to perform gamma-ray astronomy in the energy range 20 MeV to 300 GeV, with supporting measurements for gamma-ray bursts from 10 keV to 25 MeV. GLAST will be…
Results from recent multiwavelength observations of blazars are reviewed, with particular emphasis on those involving the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE). I discuss blazars' spectral energy distributions, their correlated variability at…
We take into account the constraints from the observed extragalactic gamma-ray background to estimate the maximum duty cycle allowed for a selected sample of WMAP Blazars, in order to be detectable by AGILE and GLAST gamma-ray experiments.…
The major multi-epoch VLBA programs are described and discussed in terms of relativistic beaming models. Broadly speaking the observed kinematics are consistent with models having a parent population which is only mildly relativistic but…
With their jet pointing towards us, blazars are ideal tools to study the physics and structure of extragalactic jets. Their powerful jets are cosmic particle accelerators and are alleged to be one of the production sites of the high-energy…
Young energetic pulsars will likely be the largest class of Galactic sources observed by GLAST, with many hundreds detected. Many will be unknown as radio pulsars, making pulsation detection dependent on radio and/or x-ray observations or…
Our understanding of the unification of jetted AGN has evolved greatly as jet samples have increased in size. Here, based on the largest-ever sample of over 2000 well-sampled jet spectral energy distributions, we examine the synchrotron…
The "blazar simplified view" is a new paradigm that explains well the diverse statistical properties of blazars observed over the entire electromagnetic spectrum on the basis of minimal assumptions on blazars' physical and geometrical…
The close relation between ground-based TeV observations and satellite borne $\gamma$-ray measurements has been important for the understanding of blazars. The observations which involve the TeV component in blazar studies are reviewed.
A new continuous classification system for BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects is proposed. The peak frequency of the synchrotron component in the $\nu L_{\nu}$ spectrum is used as a classifying parameter. The application of the accelerating inner…
Our recent progress on time-dependent modeling of the multiwavelength spectra and variability of blazars with leptonic and hadronic jet models is reviewed. Special emphasis is placed on X-ray spectral variability of low-frequency peaked…
Beppo}SAX contributed substantially to our understanding of the physics of blazars. This has been made possible mainly by its wide energy range and especially by its high energy detector. Together with the information coming from still…
The extreme variability of blazars, in both timescale and amplitude, is generally explained as the effect of a relativistic jet closely aligned to the observer's line-of-sight. Due to causality arguments, variability characteristics…