Related papers: "Flat" broad line region and gamma-ray absorption …
The highest-energy blazars exhibit non-thermal radiation extending beyond 1 TeV with high luminosities and strong variabilities, indicating extreme particle acceleration in their relativistic jets. The gamma-ray spectra of blazars contain…
In an absorptive plasma, damping of radiation mechanisms can influence the bremsstrahlung formation in case of large radiation formation lengths. We study qualitatively the influence of this effect on the gluon bremsstrahlung spectrum off…
AGNs are believed to be the source of very energetic cosmic rays which, in turn, produce gamma rays throughout the interactions with matter. Therefore, the study of their very-high-energy (VHE) gamma-ray spectra is fundamental to understand…
The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) from the infrared (IR) through the ultraviolet (UV) is dominated by emission from stars, either directly or through absorption and reradiation by dust. It can thus give information on the star…
One of the mysteries of very-high-energy (VHE) astrophysics is the observation of flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) above about 30 GeV, because at those energies their broad line region should prevent photons produced by the central…
It is widely accepted that the broad absorption line region (BALR) exists in most (if not all) quasars with a small covering factor. Recent works showed that the BALR is optically thick to soft and even medium energy X-rays, with a typical…
Photons with very high energy up to TeV (VHE) emitted from active galactic nuclei (AGNs) provide some invaluable information of the origin of $\gam$-ray emission. Although 66 blazars have been detected by {\it EGRET}, only three low…
Motivated by recent progress in the statistical modeling of quasar variability, we develop a new approach to measuring emission-line reverberation lags to estimate the size of broad-line regions (BLRs) in active galactic nuclei. Assuming…
Energy spectra of gamma-ray blazars may contain an imprint from the cosmic infrared background radiation due to gamma-ray absorption (pair-production) by soft photons constituting the extragalactic background light (EBL). The signature of…
Velocity-resolved reverberation mapping suggests that the broad-line regions (BLRs) of AGNs can have significant net inflow. We use the STOKES radiative transfer code to show that electron and Rayleigh scattering off the BLR and torus…
As very high energy (VHE) photons propagate through the extragalactic background light (EBL), they interact with the soft photons and initiate electromagnetic cascades of lower energy photons and electrons. The collective intensity of a…
We present the analysis and the results of a 20 ks XMM-Newton observation of the extremely X-ray loud (L_X ~ 5 x 10^{47} erg/s) flat-spectrum radio quasar RBS 315 at a redshift of 2.69. This EPIC observation has allowed us to strongly…
The absorption of gamma-rays in the intergalactic medium due to the EBL (Extragalactic Background Light) causes the observed blazar spectrum to be fainter and softer than their intrinsic state. It could thus be expected to see an effective…
The light emitted by stars and accreting compact objects through the history of the Universe is encoded in the intensity of the extragalactic background light (EBL). Knowledge of the EBL is important to understand the nature of star…
We study X-ray and soft gamma-ray spectral properties of BLRGs using data from Ginga, ASCA, OSSE and EXOSAT. The X-ray spectra are well fitted by an intrinsic power-law continuum with an energy index of alpha ~ 0.7, moderately absorbed by a…
A recent progress in the study of $\gamma$-ray jets is reviewed, with a focus on some theoretical interpretations of the VHE emission from M87, and possibly other misaligned blazars; the connection betwe en the GeV breaks exhibited by…
Blazars radiate from relativistic plasma jets with bulk Lorentz factors {\Gamma} ~ 10, closely aligned along our line of sight. In a number of blazars of the Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar type such as 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 gamma-ray flares have…
Blazars are powerful, variable emitters from radio to gamma-ray wavelengths. Even though the general picture of synchrotron emission at low energies and inverse Compton at the high energy end is well established, many important aspects of…
The nuclei of a wide class of active galaxies emit broad emission lines with widths at half maximum (FWHM) in the range $10^{3}-10^{4}$ km s$^{-1}$. This spread of widths is not solely a consequence of the range of the luminosities of these…
The structure of the broad emission line region (BLR) in active galactic nuclei (AGN) remains unclear. We test in this paper a flattened configuration model for BLR. The virial theorem, by taking into account the disc shape of BLR, allows…