Related papers: The physics and cosmology of TeV blazars in a nuts…
Black holes (BH), one of the most intriguing objects in the universe, can manifest themselves through electromagnetic radiation initiated by the accretion flow. Some stellar-mass BHs drive relativistic jets when accreting matter from their…
Cosmic rays in the inner solar system are subject to deflection by both the geomagnetic and interplanetary magnetic fields, and simultaneously interact with the Sun's photosphere resulting in the production of gamma rays. This phenomenon…
The diffuse extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGRB) above 100 MeV encodes unique information about high-energy processes in the universe. Numerous sources for the EGRB have been proposed, but the two systems which are certain to make some…
Missing cascades from TeV blazar beams indicate that collective plasma effects may play a significant role in their energy loss. It is possible to mimic the evolution of such highly energetic pair beams in laboratory experiments using…
Through the modelling of the Spectral Energy Distribution of blazars we can infer the physical parameters required to originate the flux we see. Then we can estimate the power of blazar jets in the form of matter and fields. These estimates…
Although blazars are thought to emit most of their luminosity in the gamma-ray band, there are subclasses of them very prominent in hard X-rays. These are the best candidates to be studied by Simbol-X. They are at the extremes of the blazar…
The observed relationship between X-ray luminosity and temperature of the diffuse intercluster medium clearly shows the effect of nongravitational heating on the formation of galaxy clusters. Quasar feedback into the intergalactic medium…
One way to understand the nonthermal history of the universe is by establishing the origins of the unresolved and truly diffuse extragalactic gamma rays. Dim blazars and radio/gamma galaxies certainly make an important contribution to the…
The cosmic ultraviolet background (UVB) heats the intergalactic medium (IGM), as a result the gas in dark matter halos below a certain mass is too hot to cool within a Hubble time. The UVB effectively suppresses the formation of dwarf…
The field of TeV gamma-ray astronomy has produced many exciting results over the last decade. Both the source catalogue, and the range of astrophysical questions which can be addressed, continue to expand. This article presents a topical…
Dark Matter annihilations after recombination and during the epoch of structure formation deposit energy in the primordial intergalactic medium, producing reionization and heating. We investigate the constraints that are imposed by the…
The presence of weak intergalactic magnetic fields can be studied by their effect on electro-magnetic cascades induced by multi-TeV gamma-rays in the cosmic radiation background. Small deflections of secondary electrons and positrons as the…
Active galactic nuclei (AGN) can produce both gamma rays and cosmic rays. The observed high-energy gamma-ray signals from distant blazars may be dominated by secondary gamma rays produced along the line of sight by the interactions of…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revealed a diffuse $\gamma$-ray background at energies from 0.1 GeV to 1 TeV, which can be separated into Galactic emission and an isotropic, extragalactic component. Previous efforts to understand…
Blazars are thought to emit highly-collimated outflows, so-called jets. By their close alignment to our line of sight, relativistic beaming effects enable us to observe these jets over the whole electromagnetic spectrum up to TeV energies,…
The absorption of TeV $\gamma$-ray photons produced in relativistic jets by surrounding soft photon fields is a long-standing problem of jet physics. In some cases the most likely emission site close to the central black hole is ruled out…
We test the opacity of a void Universe to TeV energy gamma rays having obtained the extra-galactic background light in that Universe using a simple model and the observed constraints on the star formation rate history. We find that the void…
Relativistic pair beams produced in the intergalactic medium (IGM) by TeV gamma rays from blazars are expected to generate a detectable GeV-scale electromagnetic cascade, yet this cascade is absent in the observed spectra of hard-spectrum…
Recent gamma-ray observations of the blazar 1ES 1101-232 (redshift z=0.186) reveal that the unabsorbed TeV spectrum is hard, with spectral index $\alpha \lesssim 0.5$ [$F(\nu) \propto \nu^{-\alpha}$]. We show that simple one-zone…
Astrophysical sources outside the Milky Way, such as active galactic nuclei and star-forming galaxies, leave their imprint on the gamma-ray sky as nearly isotropic emission referred to as the Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Background (EGB). While…