Related papers: Relativistic Flows in TeV Blazars
Recent high-sensitivity observation of the nearby radio galaxy M87 have provided important insights into the central engine that drives the large-scale outflows seen in radio, optical and X-rays. This review summarizes the observational…
An issue currently under debate in the literature is how far from the black hole is the Fermi-observed GeV emission of powerful blazars emitted. Here we present a clear diagnostic tool for testing whether the GeV emission site is located…
Blazars are known for their variability on a wide range of timescales at all wavelengths. Most studies of TeV gamma-ray blazars focus on short timescales, especially during flares. With a decade of observations from the Fermi-LAT and…
The variable flux of TeV gamma-rays detected from Mkn 421 and Mkn 501 requires the presence of high energy electrons, which could in principle produce large numbers of electron/positron pairs, leading to an electromagnetic cascade. We point…
The highest-energy blazars exhibit non-thermal radiation extending beyond 1 TeV with high luminosities and strong variabilities, indicating extreme particle acceleration in their relativistic jets. The gamma-ray spectra of blazars contain…
Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes have revealed more than 100 TeV sources along the Galactic Plane, around 45% of them remain unidentified. However, radio observations revealed that dense molecular clumps are associated with 67% of…
Supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions of solar masses are commonly found in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers seek to image jet formation using radio interferometry, but still suffer from insufficient angular…
The production site of gamma rays in blazars is closely related to their interaction with the photon fields surrounding the active galactic nucleus. In this work we discuss an indirect method that may help to unveil the presence of ambient…
We present the optical light curve for the gamma-ray blazar PKS 1510-089 with a significant variability of 2.0 mag within about 41 minutes in the R band which is the most violently rapid variability detected in our optical monitoring…
The production site of gamma rays in blazars is closely related to their interaction with the photon fields surrounding the active galactic nucleus. In this paper, we discuss an indirect method that may help to unveil the presence of…
We make use of two empirical relations between the black hole mass and the global properties (bulge luminosity and stellar velocity dispersion) of nearby elliptical galaxies, to infer the mass of the central black hole (M_BH) in low…
We explore the relation between black hole mass ($M_{\rm BH}$) and the motion of the jet components for a sample of blazars. The Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) 2cm Survey and its continuation: Monitoring of Jets in active galactic nuclei…
We report on the properties of central engines in the $\gamma$-ray blazars located at high redshifts beyond z~>~0.4, where the extra-galactic background light (EBL) starts affecting their $\gamma$-ray spectra. The physical engine that…
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…
We report results based on the monitoring of the BL Lac object Mrk 501 in the optical (B, V and R) passbands from March to May 2000. Observations spread over 12 nights were carried out using 1.2 meter Mount Abu Telescope, India and 61 cm…
Lately a specific kind of blazars drew the attention of the gamma-ray astronomy community: the extreme TeV BL Lacs, blazars that present an extremely energetic and hard emission at very high-energy. Explaining their features is still an…
Highly relativistic jets are most probably driven by strong magnetic fields and launched from the accretion disk surrounding a central black hole. Applying the jet flow parameters (velocity, density, temperature) calculated from the…
We propose a time-dependent one-zone model based on a quasi-Maxwellian `pile-up' distribution in order to explain the time-averaged high energy emission of TeV blazars. The instantaneous spectra are the result of the synchrotron and…
Blazars are a subclass of radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGNs), where the jet is aligned close to the line of sight. Blazars emission is dominated by non-thermal processes, where Doppler boosted radiation originates from a relativistic…
Kinematical and luminosity relations for black-hole jet sources are reviewed. If the TeV flares observed from PKS 2155-304 in 2006 July are assumed to originate from a black hole with mass $\approx 10^8 M_8 M_\odot$, then the $\sim 5$…