Related papers: AGILE and blazar studies
Extremely high-peaked BL Lac objects - also named extreme blazars - are among the most energetic and persistent extragalactic accelerators in the Universe, defined by a synchrotron emission peaking above $10^{17}$ Hz in X-rays. Such…
Motivated by the Costamante & Ghisellini (2002) predictions we investigated if the blazar 1ES 1727+502 (z=0.055) is emitting very high energy (VHE, E>100 GeV) gamma rays. We observed the BL Lac object 1ES 1727+502 in stereoscopic mode with…
We present the first catalog of active galactic nuclei (AGN) detected by the LAT, corresponding to 11 months of data collected in scientific operation mode. The First LAT AGN Catalog (1LAC) includes 671 gamma-ray sources located at high…
The blazar 1ES 1101-232 was observed with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) of Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (ACT) in 2004 and 2005, for a live time of 43 hours. VHE (E > 10^11 eV) gamma-rays were detected for the first time…
GRB 080514B is the first gamma ray burst (GRB), since the time of EGRET, for which individual photons of energy above several tens of MeV have been detected with a pair-conversion tracker telescope. This burst was discovered with the…
Previously unremarkable, the extragalactic radio source GB 1310+487 showed a gamma-ray flare on 2009 November 18, reaching a daily flux of ~10^-6 photons/cm^2/s at energies E>100 MeV and becoming one of the brightest GeV sources for about…
Extreme high-frequency peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are blazars which exhibit extremely energetic synchrotron emission. They also feature non-thermal gamma-ray emission whose peak lies in the very high-energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) range, and…
Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) exhibit variability across the entire electromagnetic spectrum with distinct flaring episodes at different frequencies. The high sensitivity and nearly uniform sky coverage of the Large Area Telescope on board…
During the month of December, 2009 the blazar 3C 454.3 became the brightest gamma-ray source in the sky, reaching a peak flux F ~2000E-8 ph/cm2/s for E > 100 MeV. Starting in November, 2009 intensive multifrequency campaigns monitored the…
The AGILE satellite detected several episodes of transient gamma-ray emission from Cygnus X-3. Cross-correlating the AGILE light curve with both X-ray and radio monitoring data, we found that the main events of gamma-ray activity were…
Very high energy (VHE; >100 GeV) observations of a sample of selected active galactic nuclei (AGN) were performed between January 2005 and April 2007 with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS), an array of imaging atmospheric-Cherenkov…
Recent VHE observations have unveiled a surprising behaviour in two well-known blazars at opposite sides of the blazar sequence. PKS 2155-304 have shown for the first time in an HBL a large Compton dominance, high gamma-ray luminosities and…
The MAGIC telescope observed the region around the distant blazar 3C 66A for 54.2 h in 2007 August-December. The observations resulted in the discovery of a gamma-ray source at energies above 150 GeV centered at celestial coordinates…
AGILE is an Italian Space Agency mission dedicated to the observation of the gamma-ray Universe. The AGILE very innovative instrumentation combines for the first time a gamma-ray imager (sensitive in the energy range 30 MeV - 50 GeV), a…
Only BL Lac objects have been detected as extragalactic sources of very high energy (E > 300 GeV) gamma rays. Using the Whipple Observatory Gamma-ray Telescope, we have attempted to detect more BL Lacs using three approaches. First, we have…
SuperAGILE is the hard X-ray monitor of the AGILE gamma ray mission, in orbit since 23$^{rd}$ April 2007. It is an imaging experiment based on a set of four independent silicon strip detectors, equipped with one-dimensional coded masks,…
Blazars are a highly-variable, radio-loud subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGN). In order to better understand such objects we must be able to easily identify candidate blazars from the growing population of unidentified sources. Working…
We present the light curve data of a remarkable blazer 3C 454.3 (z=0.859) in optical, X-ray, and gamma-ray bands. Since January 2008, we have been monitoring this object using the 50 cm MITSuME, a optical telescope, and detected several…
Large number of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) producing Very-High-Energy (VHE) gamma-rays (energies above 100~GeV) has been revealed using observations with Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs). However, our knowledge of the VHE…
We present the results of a series of Swift and quasi simultaneous ground-based infra-red observations of the blazar 3C 454.3 carried out in April-May 2005 when the source was 10 to 30 times brighter than previously observed. We found 3C…