Related papers: Rapid optical variability of TeV blazars
We discuss the implications of rapid (few-minute) variability in the TeV flux of blazars, which has been observed recently with the HESS and MAGIC telescopes. The variability timescales seen in PKS 2155-304 and Mrk 501 are much shorter than…
Highly variable Markarian 421 is a bright high synchrotron energy peaked blazar showing wide featureless non-thermal spectrum making it a good candidate for our study of intraday flux and spectral variations over time. We analyse its X-ray…
Context. The radio galaxy IC 310 has recently been identified as a gamma-ray emitter based on observations at GeV energies with Fermi-LAT and at very high energies (VHE, E>100GeV) with the MAGIC telescopes. Originally classified as a…
The HEGRA system of four Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) has been used to extensively observe extragalactic objects. In this paper we describe the search for TeV emission from nine very promising potential TeV sources,…
The recently completed High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) gamma-ray observatory has been taking data with a partial array for more than one year and is now operating with >95% duty cycle in its full configuration. With an instantaneous…
Multi-wavelength observations with TeV photons are an essential diagnostic tool to study the physics of TeV sources. The complex variability of blazars, however (timescales from years down to minutes, with different patterns and SED…
We present the results of the power spectral density (PSD) analysis for the blazars Mrk\,421 and PKS\,2155$-$304, using good-quality, densely sampled light curves at multiple frequencies, covering 17 decades of the electromagnetic spectrum,…
We report results from a 1 week multi-wavelength campaign to monitor the BL Lac object S5 0716+714 (on December 9-16, 2009). In the radio bands the source shows rapid (~ (0.5-1.5) day) intra-day variability with peak amplitudes of up to ~…
We report the results of photometric observations of the blazars Mrk 421 and 3C 454.3 designed to search for intraday variability (IDV) and short-term variability (STV). Optical photometric observations were spread over eighteen nights for…
BL Lacertae is not only archetypical of an entire class of jet-dominated active galactic nuclei, blazars, but also one of the most active and rapidly changing objects in this class. In the fall of 2024 (September--November), BL Lacertae…
The typical blazar S5 0716$+$714 is very interesting due to its rapid and large amplitude variability and high duty cycle of micro-variability in optical band. We analyze the observations in I, R and V bands obtained with the $1.0m$…
We present 10 years of R-band monitoring data of 31 northern blazars which were either detected at very high energy (VHE) gamma rays or listed as potential VHE gamma-ray emitters. The data comprise 11820 photometric data points in the…
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…
Understanding the high-energy emission processes and variability patterns are two of the most challenging research problems associated with relativistic jets. In particular, the long-term (months-to-years) flux variability at very high…
Blazars are the brightest and most abundant persistent sources in the extragalactic gamma-ray sky. Due to their significance, they are often observed across various energy bands to explore potential correlations between emissions at…
A detailed analysis of the optical polarimetric variability of the TeV blazar 1ES 1959+650 from 2007 October 18 to 2011 May 5 is presented. The source showed a maximum and minimum brightness states in the R-band of 14.08$\pm$0.03 mag and…
Hard-TeV BL Lacs are a new type of blazars characterized by a hard intrinsic TeV spectrum, locating the peak of their gamma-ray emission in the spectral energy distribution (SED) above 2-10 TeV. Such high energies are problematic for the…
Recently, a new method to constrain the distances of blazars with unknown redshift using combined observations in the GeV and TeV regimes has been developed. The underlying assumption is that the Very High Energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) spectrum…
Recent Cherenkov observations of BL Lac objects showed that the TeV flux of PKS 2155-304 changed by a factor 2 in just 3-5 minutes. This fast variability can be accounted for if the emitting region is moving with a bulk Lorentz factor…
The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) can be probed via the absorption imprint it leaves in the spectra of gamma-ray sources ($\gamma\gamma \rightarrow e^-e^+$). We recently developed a dedicated technique to reconstruct the EBL, and its…