Related papers: Blazar properties: an update from recent results
The discovery of strong gamma-ray and hard X-ray emission and the results from various multifrequency campaigns have disclosed new aspects of the blazar phenomenology, leading to a much more robust understanding of the mechanisms underlying…
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…
We investigate the previously proposed possibility that multi-epoch broadband polarimetry could act as a complement or limited proxy for VLBI observations of blazars, in that the number of polarised emission components in the jet, and some…
Being dominated by non-thermal emission from aligned relativistic jets, blazars allow us to elucidate the physics of extragalactic jets, and, ultimately, how energy is extracted from the central black hole. Crucial information about jet…
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…
The Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi LAT) provides long term systematic monitoring observations of the gamma-ray emission from blazars. The variability properties and the correlation with other wavelength bands are important clues for the…
The current status of leptonic jet models for gamma-ray blazars is reviewed. Differences between the quasar and BL-Lac subclasses of blazars may be understood in terms of the dominance of different radiation mechanisms in the gamma-ray…
We present an overview of the current theoretical models attempting to describe the structure and radiative processes operating in blazars and discuss the observational constraints that these models must confront.
I review the current knowledge of high-energy emission from extragalctic jets. First I discuss gamma-ray emission from blazars, which provides us numerous precious information on the innermost portions of the relativistic jets. I describe…
The LAT instrument, onboard the Fermi satellite, in its first three months of operation detected more than 100 blazars at more than the 10 sigma level. This is already a great improvement with respect to its predecessor, the instrument…
Blazars are a class of active galactic nuclei which host relativistic jets oriented close to the observer's line of sight. Blazars have very complex variability properties. Flares, namely flux variations around the mean value with a…
Studies of jet-shape observables in hard processes are summarized together with future developments
I address the need for deep blazar surveys by showing that our current understanding of blazars is based on a relatively small number of intrinsically luminous sources. I then review the on-going deeper surveys, addressing in particular…
Introduced in 1998 to attempt a first unified view of the broad-band emission properties of blazars, the blazar sequence has been extensively used in the past 25 years to guide observations as well as physical interpretation of the overall…
Blazars are thought to emit highly-collimated outflows, so-called jets. By their close alignment to our line of sight, relativistic beaming effects enable us to observe these jets over the whole electromagnetic spectrum up to TeV energies,…
Blazars are a sub-class of quasars with Doppler boosted jets oriented close to the line of sight, and thus efficient probes of supermassive black hole growth and their environment, especially at high redshifts. Here we report on Very Long…
The past 20 years have seen phenomenal progress in our understanding of BL Lac objects. They form part of the blazar class, which are radio-loud AGN whose relativistic jets are aligned along our line of sight. Several critical milestones…
The rareness of blazars, combined with the previous history of relatively shallow, single-band surveys, has dramatically colored our perception of these objects. Despite a quarter-century of research, it is not at all clear whether current…
Blazar spectra are one of the most important windows into the physical processes occurring along jets. The spectrum, composed from the different emitting regions along the jet, allows us to constrain the physical conditions in the jet. I…
Blazars represent dominant population of the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray sources in the Universe. These sources exhibit some characteristic properties like strong and non-thermal continuum emission over the entire electromagnetic spectrum…