Related papers: High redshift blazars
Large-scale surveys over the last years have revealed about 300 QSOs at redshift above 6. Follow-up observations identified surprising properties, such as the very high black hole (BH) masses, spatial correlations with surrounding cold gas…
The radiation observed by blazars is believed to originate from the transformation of bulk kinetic energy of relativistic jets into random energy. A simple way to achieve this is to have an intermittent central power source, producing…
Quasars, as the most luminous persistent sources in the Universe, have broad applications for cosmological studies. In particular, they can be employed to directly measure the expansion history of the Universe, similarly to SNe Ia. The…
Blazars are jetted active galactic nuclei with a jet pointing close to the line of sight, hence enhancing their intrinsic luminosity and variability. Monitoring these sources is essential in order to catch them flaring and promptly organize…
The most massive black holes lie in the most massive elliptical galaxies, and at low-z all radio-loud AGNs lie in giant ellipticals. This strongly suggests a link between radio-loudness and black hole mass. We argue that the increase in the…
The extragalactic high-energy $\gamma$-ray sky is dominated by blazars, which are active galactic nuclei with their jets pointing towards us. Distance measurements are of fundamental importance yet for some of these sources are challenging…
Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs) are the most powerful relativistic jets seen from supermassive black holes (BHs) accreting via a radiatively efficient thin disc. Their high energy emission is well modelled by highly relativistic…
In recent years, blazar surveys at radio and X-ray energies have greatly increased our understanding of this type of active galaxy. The combination of multi-wavelength data has shown that blazars follow a well defined sequence in terms of…
Context. NRAO 150 is one of the brightest radio and mm AGN sources on the northern sky. It has been revealed as an interesting source where to study extreme relativistic jet phenomena. However, its cosmological distance has not been…
The radiation we observe from blazars is most likely the product of the transformation of bulk kinetic energy into random energy. This process must have a relatively small efficiency (e.g. 10%) if jets are to power the extended…
Much effort has been done in order to better understand the active galactic nuclei mechanisms behind the relativistic jets observed in radio-loud sources. These phenomena are commonly seen in luminous objects with intermediate/high redshift…
B2 1023+25 is an extremely radio-loud quasar at z=5.3 which was first identified as a likely high-redshift blazar candidate in the SDSS+FIRST quasar catalog. Here we use the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) to investigate its…
There is considerable evidence that powerful radio quasars and radio galaxies are orientation-dependent manifestations of the same parent population: massive spheroids containing correspondingly massive black holes. Following the…
High-redshift blazars are valuable tools to study the early Universe. So far only a handful of $\gamma$-ray blazars have been found at redshifts above 3. $\gamma$-ray signals are detected in the direction of PMN J2219-2719 ($z=3.63$) and…
Most of the light from blazars, active galactic nuclei with jets of magnetized plasma that point nearly along the line of sight, is produced by high-energy particles, up to $\sim 1$ TeV. Although the jets are known to be ultimately powered…
Recent observational and theoretical results on blazars are presented and discussed. We are beginning to understand the rich phenomenology of blazars, and we are finding trends which will hopefully lead us to unveil the physics of these…
The first high-energy neutrino source identified by IceCube was a blazar -- an active galactic nucleus driving a relativistic jet towards Earth. Jets driven by accreting black holes are commonly assumed to be needed for high-energy neutrino…
We derive the most up-to-date Swift-Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) blazar luminosity function in the 14-195 keV range, making use of a clean sample of 118 blazars detected in the BAT 105-month survey catalog, with newly obtained redshifts from…
The radio-loud quasar SDSS J114657.79+403708.6 at a redshift z=5.0 is one of the most distant radio-loud objects. The IR-optical luminosity and spectrum suggest that its black hole has a very large mass: M=(5+-1)x 1e9 Msun. The…
Several arguments suggest that quasars at z > 4 may be in the cores of future giant ellipticals, and forming at the very highest peaks of the primordial density field. A strong bias-driven primordial clustering is then expected in these…