Related papers: Blazars in hard X-rays
Blazars, radio-loud active galactic nuclei with the relativistic jet closely aligned with the line of sight, dominate the extragalactic sky observed at gamma-ray energies, above 100 MeV. We discuss some of the emission properties of these…
The recent Cherenkov telescope observations and detections of the BL Lac objects Mkn 421, Mkn 501, 1ES 2344+514, PKS 2155--304 and possibly 1ES 1959+658 have shown that there exists a subclass of BL Lac objects emitting a substantial…
Blazars are sources whose jet is pointing to us. Since their jets are relativistic, the flux is greatly amplified in the direction of motion, making blazars the most powerful persistent objects in the Universe. This is true at all…
In recent years, blazar surveys at radio and X-ray energies have greatly increased our understanding of this type of active galaxy. The combination of multi-wavelength data has shown that blazars follow a well defined sequence in terms of…
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 spectra of blazars form a sequence which can be parametrized in term of their observed bolometric luminosity. At the most powerful extreme of the sequence we find objects whose jet power can rival the power extracted by accretion, while…
With their rapid, violent variability and broad featureless continuum emission, blazars have puzzled astronomers for over two decades. Today blazars represent the only extragalactic objects detected in high-energy gamma-rays. Their spectral…
Advances in the capabilities of X-ray, gamma-ray and TeV telescopes have brought new information on the physics of relativistic jets, which are responsible for the blazar "phenomenon". In particular the broad band sensitivity of the…
Blazars are the most violent steady/recurrent sources of high-energy gamma-ray emission in the known Universe. They are prominent emitters of electromagnetic radiation throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The observable radiation…
We have considered all blazars observed in the X-ray band and for which the slope of the X-ray spectrum is available. We have collected 421 spectra of 268 blazars, including 12 archival unpublished ASCA spectra of 7 blazars whose analysisis…
Extreme high-energy peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are an emerging class of blazars with exceptional spectral properties. The non-thermal emission of the relativistic jet peaks in the spectral energy distribution (SED) plot with the…
Recent observations of blazars at high energy (HE, 0.1-100 GeV) and very high energy (VHE, >0.1 TeV) have provided important constraints on the intensity and spectrum of the diffuse Extragalactic Background Light (EBL), shedding light on…
MeV blazars are the most luminous persistent sources in the Universe and emit most of their energy in the MeV band. These objects display very large jet powers and accretion luminosities and are known to host black holes with a mass often…
Although the gamma-ray emission in blazars dominates the power output, there are crucial informations carried by the X-rays. Indeed, their paucity, together with the short variability timescales observed both at X and gamma-ray energies…
Blazars are the most plentiful gamma-ray source at GeV energies, and despite detailed study, there is much that is not known about these sources. In this review I explore some recent results on blazars, including the controversy of the…
The detection of high-redshift ($z>$3) blazars enables the study of the evolution of the most luminous relativistic jets over cosmic time. More importantly, high-redshift blazars tend to host massive black holes and can be used to constrain…
Extremely high-peaked BL Lac objects (or extreme blazars) are unique extragalactic laboratories where particle acceleration processes are pushed at their physical limits. In these blazars, synchrotron emission peaking above keV energies is…
Extreme high-energy peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are a new emerging class of blazars. The typical two-hump structured spectral energy distribution (SED) is shifted to higher energies with respect to other more established classes of…
TeV-emitting BL Lac type blazars represent the extreme end of the blazar population. They are characterized by relatively weak jets and radiatively inefficient accretion disks. Particles accelerated in these jets experience fewer radiative…
Blazar spectral energy distributions (SEDs) are double peaked and follow a self-similar sequence in luminosity. The so-called "blue" blazars, whose first SED component peaks at X-ray energies, are TeV sources, although with a relatively…