Related papers: The central pc-scale region in blazars: insights f…
Relativistic jets from accreting supermassive black holes at cosmological distances can be powerful emitters of $\gamma$-rays. However, the precise mechanisms and locations responsible for the dissipation of energy within these jets,…
Blazars are a sub-class of quasars with Doppler boosted jets oriented close to the line of sight, and thus efficient probes of supermassive black hole growth and their environment, especially at high redshifts. Here we report on Very Long…
(abridged) Relativistic jets, formed in the vicinity of central supermassive black holes in AGN, show ample evidence connecting them to physical conditions in the accretion disc and broad-line region. The jets are responsible for a large…
Being dominated by non-thermal emission from aligned relativistic jets, blazars allow us to elucidate the physics of extragalactic jets, and, ultimately, how energy is extracted from the central black hole. Crucial information about jet…
High resolution radio observations remain the most direct way to study the formation and evolution of radio jets associated with the accretion onto massive black holes. We report preliminary results of our seven year VLBA observational…
The Fermi and Swift satellites, together with ground based Cherenkov telescopes, has greatly improved our knowledge of blazars, namely Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars and BL Lac objects, since all but the most powerful emit most of their…
Whether the X-ray emissions of strong jet sources originate from disk+coronas or jets is still controversial. In this work, we constructed a strong jet sample containing 50 flat-spectrum radio quasars, 51 low-synchrotron-peaked BL Lac…
An increasing number of blazars have been reported to show jet wobbling (i.e., non-regular rotations of the structural position angle of their innermost jets in the plane of the sky with amplitudes between 20 deg. and 50 deg., and time…
The production site of gamma rays in blazars is closely related to their interaction with the photon fields surrounding the active galactic nucleus. In this work we discuss an indirect method that may help to unveil the presence of ambient…
We have not identified for sure what is the mechanism launching, accelerating and collimating relativistic jets. The two most likely possibilities are the gravitational energy of the accreting matter or the rotational energy of a spinning…
Blazar spectra are one of the most important windows into the physical processes occurring along jets. The spectrum, composed from the different emitting regions along the jet, allows us to constrain the physical conditions in the jet. I…
The $\gamma$-ray production mechanism and its localization in blazars are still a matter of debate. The main goal of this paper is to constrain the location of the high-energy emission in the blazar TXS 2013+370 and to study the physical…
The production site of gamma rays in blazars is closely related to their interaction with the photon fields surrounding the active galactic nucleus. In this paper, we discuss an indirect method that may help to unveil the presence of…
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…
Relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei represent one of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe. They form in the surroundings of the supermassive black holes as a by-product of accretion onto the central black hole in active…
The mechanism by which outflows and plausible jets are driven from black hole systems, still remains observationally elusive. Notwithstanding, several observational evidences and deeper theoretical insights reveal that accretion and…
We propose a sequence (the Blazar main sequence, BMS) that links the two main components of the Blazar class, namely, the Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars and the BL Lacertae objects, and yields all their distinctive features in a correlated…
We study the impact of the geometry of the broad line region (BLR) on the expected absorption, through the \gamma\gamma\rightarrow e^{\pm} process, of gamma rays produced in the relativistic jet of flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQ). We…
The $Fermi$ blazar observations show a strong correlation between $\gamma$-ray luminosities and spectral indices. BL Lac objects are less luminous with harder spectra than flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs). Interestingly FSRQs are evident…
The exact location of the $\gamma$-ray emitting region in blazar jets has long been a matter of debate. However, the location has important implications about the emission processes, geometric and physical parameters of the jet, as well as…