Related papers: TeV blazar variability: the firehose instability?

It is demonstrated that low frequency shear modes in a strongly coupled, inhomogeneous, dusty plasma can grow on account of an instability involving the dynamical charge fluctuations of the dust grains. The instability is driven by the…

Context. Blazars are radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN) with a jet pointing at small angles towards the observer. The overall emitted spectrum is typically non-thermal, and in some cases the emission and/or absorption lines are so…

Lately a specific kind of blazars drew the attention of the gamma-ray astronomy community: the extreme TeV BL Lacs, blazars that present an extremely energetic and hard emission at very high-energy. Explaining their features is still an…

The kinetic energy of bulk relativistic plasma ejected from the central engine of blazars is converted into nonthermal particle energy in the comoving frame through a process of sweeping up material from the surrounding medium. The…

We present the results of optical photometric observations of three extreme TeV blazars, 1ES 0229$+$200, 1ES 0414$+$009, and 1ES 2344$+$514, taken with two telescopes (1.3 m Devasthal Fast Optical Telescope, and 1.04 m Sampuranand…

Blazars, a class of active galaxies whose jets are relativistic and collimated flows of plasma directed along the line of sight and are prone to a slew of magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities. We aim to study the interplay of radiation…

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…

We present exactly simultaneous X-ray and TeV monitoring with {\it RXTE} and HEGRA of the TeV blazar Mrk 501 during 15 days in 1998 June. After an initial period of very low flux at both wavelengths, the source underwent a remarkable flare…

Blazars are well known for the violent variability from the radio to gamma-ray wavelengths. In this paper, we present a brief summary of the X-ray variability recently obtained for TeV blazars. We also point out the probable similarities of…

Using high-resolution data from Solar Orbiter, we investigate the plasma conditions necessary for the proton temperature anisotropy driven mirror-mode and oblique firehose instabilities to occur in the solar wind. We find that the unstable…

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…

In this work we present a polarization analysis at radio frequencies of Markarian 421, one of the closest (z=0.03) TeV blazars. The observations were obtained, both in total and in polarized intensity, with the Very Long Baseline Array…

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are known to show significant variability over a wide frequency range. We review observational results on the variability characteristics of blazars in the very high energy (VHE) domain, focusing on recent…

For the BL Lac object S5 0716+714 conflicting apparent velocities of jet component motion have been reported in the literature. This object is an intra-day variable source and suited to investigate a possible correlation between kinematic…

Rapid flares from blazars in very high energy (VHE) $\gamma$-rays challenge the common understanding of jets of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The same population of ultra-relativistic electrons is often thought to be responsible for both…

The recent development of tomographic analysis of radio data shows the presence of sheaths around several extragalactic jets. We have studied the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability of such stratified jets, describing them as inner relativistic…

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 summarize broadband observations of the TeV-emitting blazar 1ES 1959+650, including optical R-band observations by the robotic telescopes Super-LOTIS and iTelescope, UV observations by Swift UVOT, X-ray observations by the Swift X-ray…

The TeV blazar PKS 2155--304 was the subject of an intensive 2 week optical and near-infrared observing campaign in 2004 August with the CTIO 0.9m telescope. During this time, simultaneous X-ray data from RXTE were also obtained. We compare…

Despite numerous detections of individual flares, the physical origin of the rapid variability observed from blazars remains uncertain. Using Bayesian blocks and the Eisenstein-Hut HOP algorithm, we characterize flux variations of high…