Related papers: TeV blazar variability: the firehose instability?
We study the stochastic variation of blazar emission under a 2-D spatially resolved leptonic jet model we previously developed. Random events of particle acceleration and injection in small zones within the emission region are assumed to be…
The rapid variability of the VHE emission reported for some TeV blazars implies Doppler factors well in excess of those inferred from superluminal motions and unification schemes. We propose that those extreme flares may result from…
Depending on the physical conditions involved the beam plasma systems may reveal new unstable regimes triggered by the wave instabilities of different nature. We show through linear theory and numerical simulations the existence of an…
The fast TeV variability of the blazars Mrk 501 and PKS 2155--304 implies a compact emitting region that moves with a bulk Lorentz factor of Gamma_{em}~100 toward the observer. The Lorentz factor is clearly in excess of the jet Lorentz…
We compare the rise and decay timescales of $\sim$200 long-term ($\sim$weeks-months) GeV and R-band outbursts and $\sim$25 short-term ($\sim$hr-day) GeV flares in a sample of 10 blazars using light curves from the Fermi-LAT and the…
Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 are two close, bright and well-studied high-synchrotron-peaked blazars, which feature bright and persistent GeV and TeV emission. We use the longest and densest dataset of unbiased observations of these two sources,…
We investigate the temporal variability of polarization of synchrotron radiation from blazar jets. Multiwavelength observations revealed high-amplitude rotations of the electric vector position angle (EVPA), both in the optical and in the…
Rapid variability of the TeV emission in several blazars implies a central black hole mass $M_{BH}<10^8M_\odot$, appreciably smaller than the values estimated from the $M_{BH}-L_{bulg}$ relation, and Doppler factors for the $\gamma$-ray…
We present the results of polarimetric ($R$ band) and multicolor photometric ($BVRIJHK$) observations of the blazar AO 0235+16 during an outburst in 2006 December. The data reveal a short timescale of variability (several hours), which…
The annihilation of TeV photons from extragalactic TeV sources and the extragalactic background light produces ultrarelativistic $e^{\pm}$ beams, which are subject to powerful plasma instabilities that sap their kinetic energy. Here we…
Observations show various jets in the solar atmosphere with significant rotational motions, which may undergo instabilities leading to heat ambient plasma. We study the Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability of twisted and rotating jets caused…
Combined with very-long-baseline interferometry measurements, the observations of fast TeV gamma-ray flares probe the structure and emission mechanism of blazar jets. However, only a handful of such flares have been detected to date, and…
We study the effects of heat flows and velocity shear on the parallel firehose instability in weakly collisional plasma flow. For this purpose we apply an anisotropic 16-moments MHD fluid closure model that takes into account the pressure…
The extreme TeV blazar 1ES 0229+200 is a high-frequency-peaked BL Lacertae object. It has not shown intraday variability in extensive optical and X-ray observations. Nor has it shown any significant variability on any measurable timescale…
Motivated by the recent finding of hierarchical X-ray flaring phenomenon in Mrk 421, we conducted a systematic search for X-ray flares from Mrk 501, another well-known TeV blazar, by making use of the rich {\em RXTE} archival database. We…
We have examined 40 NuSTAR light curves (LCs) of five TeV emitting high synchrotron peaked blazars: 1ES 0229+200, Mrk 421, Mrk 501, 1ES 1959+650 and PKS 2155-304. Four of the blazars showed intraday variability in the NuSTAR energy range of…
We investigate the formation of TeV spectrum of a distant blazar PKS 1424+240 residing at a redshift $z\geq0.6$ in two scenarios in the frame of a lepto-hadronic jet model taking both the uncertainties of the extragalactic background light…
Aims. We aim to investigate the extreme variability properties of the TeV blazar S4 0954+65 using optical photometric and polarisation observations carried out between 2017 and 2023 using three ground-based telescopes. Methods. We examined…
Blazars are highly variable sources over timescales that can be as low as minutes. This is the case of the High Energy Peaked BL Lac (HBL) objects showing strong variability in X-rays, which highly correlate with that of the TeV emission.…
The extreme variability of blazars, in both timescale and amplitude, is generally explained as the effect of a relativistic jet closely aligned to the observer's line-of-sight. Due to causality arguments, variability characteristics…