Related papers: Powerful extragalactic jets
Gamma-ray blazars are among the most extreme astrophysical sources, harboring phenomena far more energetic than those attainable by terrestrial accelerators. These galaxies are understood to be active galactic nuclei that are powered by…
Quasars with flat radio spectra and one-sided, arc-second scale, ~100 mJy GHz radio jets are found to have similar scale X-ray jets in about 60% of such objects, even in short 5 to 10 ks Chandra observations. Jets emit in the GHz band via…
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…
Collimated outflows (jets) appear to be a ubiquitous phenomenon associated with the accretion of material onto a compact object. Despite this ubiquity, many fundamental physics aspects of jets are still poorly understood and constrained.…
The impact of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on blazar research is reviewed. This includes a brief description of the Fermi Large Area Telescope, a summary of the various classes of extragalactic sources found in the First Large Area…
Blazars exhibit flux and spectral variations of largest amplitude at the highest frequencies. Therefore, monitoring their variability at X- and gamma-rays is the most effective tool to peer into the mighty powerhouse of these sources. High…
Estimates on different scales of the power of relativistic bulk motion in extragalactic and galactic jets are presented. The power in the jets and the power produced by the accretion disk are found to be roughly equal. This may suggest an…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Observatory discovered about a thousand extragalactic sources emitting energy from 100 MeV to 100 GeV. The majority of these sources belong to the class of blazars characterized by a quasi-featureless optical spectrum…
Before the launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope satellite only two classes of active galactic nuclei (AGN) were known to generate relativistic jets and thus to emit up to the $\gamma$-ray energy range: blazars and radio galaxies,…
The dramatic relativistic jets pointing directly at us in BL Lac objects can be well modelled by bulk motion beaming of synchrotron self-Compton emission powered by a low Eddington fraction accretion flow. Nearly 500 of these AGN are seen…
While observations in the radio band are providing essential information on the innermost structures of relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei (AGN), the recent detection by Fermi of gamma-ray emission from many hundreds of blazars…
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…
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 recent discovery, by the Chandra satellite, that jets of blazars are strong X-ray emitters at large scales (0.1-1 Mpc) bears support to the hypothesis that (also) on these scales the emitting plasma is moving at highly relativistic…
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…
Blazars are high-energy engines providing us natural laboratories to study particle acceleration, relativistic plasma processes, magnetic field dynamics, black hole physics. Key informations are provided by observations at high-energy (in…
Relativistic jets are one of the most powerful manifestations of the release of energy related to the supermassive black holes at the centre of active galactic nuclei (AGN). Their emission is observed across the entire electromagnetic…
Jets are ubiquitous in accreting black holes. Often ignored, they may be a major contributor to the emitted spectral energy distribution for sub-Eddington black holes. For example, recent observations of radio-to-X-ray correlations and…
High redshift blazars are among the most powerful non-explosive sources in the Universe and play a crucial role in understanding the evolution of relativistic jets. To understand these bright objects, we performed a detailed investigation…
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…