Related papers: Photon and neutrino emission from active galactic …
Gamma-ray emission in active galaxies is likely produced within the inner jet, or in the close vicinity of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) at sub-parsec distances. Gamma rays have to pass through the surrounding massive stellar cluster…
Active galactic nuclei come in many varieties. A minority of them are radio-loud, and exhibit two opposite prominent plasma jets extending from the proximity of the supermassive black hole up to megaparsec distances. When one of the…
Neutrino emission in coincidence with gamma rays has been observed from the blazar TXS 0506+056 by the IceCube telescope. Neutrinos from the blazar had to pass through a dense spike of dark matter (DM) surrounding the central black hole.…
We investigate the electrostatic acceleration of electrons and positrons in the vicinity of the event horizon, applying the pulsar outer-gap model to black hole magnetospheres. During a low accretion phase, the radiatively inefficient…
Relativistic outflows are a common phenomenon in accreting black holes. Despite the enormous differences in scale, accreting stellar-mass black holes (X-ray binaries, collapsars) and super-massive black holes produce jets with analogous…
The origin of ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) is a half-century old enigma (Linsley 1963). The mystery has been deepened by an intriguing coincidence: over ten orders of magnitude in energy, the energy generation rates of UHECRs, PeV…
Water and ice Cherenkov telescopes of the present and future aim for the detection of a neutrino signal from extraterrestrial sources at energies E>PeV. Some of the most promising extragalactic sources are Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In…
We investigate the electron-positron pair cascade taking place in the magnetosphere of a rapidly rotating black hole. Because of the spacetime frame dragging, the Goldreich-Julian charge density changes sign in the vicinity of the event…
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…
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…
Supermassive black hole binary systems (SMBHBs) are thought to emit the recently discovered nHz gravitational wave background; however, not a single individual nHz source has been confirmed to date. Long-term radio-monitoring at the Owens…
We propose a novel mechanism for powering the central engines of Active Galactic Nuclei through super-critical (type II) black hole collapse. In this picture, ~$10^3 M_\odot$ of material collapsing at relativistic speeds can trigger a…
With their emission mainly coming from a relativistic jet pointing towards us, blazars are fundamental sources to study extragalactic jets and their central engines, consisting of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) fed by accretion discs.…
The most powerful sources among the blazar family are MeV blazars. Often detected at $z>2$, they usually display high X- and \gm-ray luminosities, larger-than-average jet powers and black hole masses $\gtrsim 10^9 M_{\odot}$. In the present…
Collimated relativistic outflows, or jets, are amongst the most energetic and relativistic phenomena in the Universe. They are associated with supermassive black holes in distant active galactic nuclei (AGN), accreting black holes and…
The properties of relativistic radio jets are thought to be closely connected with the properties of accretion disks in active galactic nuclei. We explore this issue using a sample of 35 blazars with very-long baseline observations, for…
Bright blazars were found to be prominent neutrino sources, and a number of IceCube events were associated with them. Evaluating high-energy photon emission of such blazars is crucial for better understanding of the processes and regions…
Although blazars are thought to emit most of their luminosity in the gamma-ray band, there are subclasses of them very prominent in hard X-rays. These are the best candidates to be studied by Simbol-X. They are at the extremes of the blazar…
Context: An electron-positron beam escaping from the magnetospheric vacuum gap of an accreting black hole interacts with recombination-line photons from surrounding gas clouds. Inverse-Compton scattering and subsequent pair production…
Blazars are promising candidates for high energy neutrino sources, yet the physical origin of their neutrino emission remains uncertain. In this work, we extend our previous study by modeling the broadband spectral energy distributions…