Related papers: Blazars at the Cosmic Dawn
We study a sample of 30 high-redshift blazars ($z>2.5$) by means of spectra and the radiation mechanism with Fermi Large Area Telescope $\gamma$-ray observations spanning 15 years. Three models -- the power law, power law with an…
High-redshift ($z >3$) $\gamma$-ray blazars are rare, but they are crucial for our understanding of jet evolution, $\gamma$-ray production and propagation, and the growth of supermassive black holes in the early universe. A new analysis of…
Up to now, jet kinematic studies of radio quasars have barely reached beyond the redshift range at $z>3.5$. This significantly limits our knowledge of high-redshift jets, which can provide key information for understanding the jet nature…
Quasars are galaxies hosting accreting supermassive black holes; due to their brightness, they are unique probes of the early universe. To date, only few quasars have been reported at $z > 6.5$ ($<$800 Myr after the Big Bang). In this work,…
I discuss two programs to study radio-loud quasars at high (z>4) redshift. Quasars are the most luminous, non-transient objects known and are observed to the earliest cosmic epochs. At lower redshifts, radio-loud quasars are associated with…
At redshift larger than 3 there is a disagreement between the number of blazars (whose jet is pointing at us) and the number of expected parents (whose jet is pointing elsewhere). Now we strengthen this claim because (i) the number of…
The most powerful blazars are the flat spectrum radio quasars whose emission is dominated by a Compton component peaking between a few hundred keV and a few hundred MeV. We selected two bright blazars, PKS 2149-306 at redshift z=2.345 and…
We study the quasi-simultaneous near-IR, optical, UV, and X-ray photometry of eleven gamma-ray selected blazars for which redshift estimates larger than 1.2 have been recently provided. Four of these objects turn out to be high-power…
High-redshift blazars are among the most powerful objects in the Universe. The spectral and temporal properties of thirty-three distant blazars ($z>2.5$) detected in the high energy $\gamma$-ray band are investigated by analyzing the {\it…
High-redshift blazars are one of the most powerful monsters in the universe and $\gamma$-ray variability carries crucial information of their relativistic jets. In this work we present results of the first systematical temporal analysis of…
Volonteri et al. (2011) found that the number of radio-loud quasars above redshift 4 calculated from the luminosity function (based upon Swift/BAT observations) is much smaller than the number estimated from the known high-redshift beamed…
We have selected SDSS J222032.50+002537.5 and SDSS J142048.01+120545.9 as best blazar candidates out of a complete sample of extremely radio-loud quasars at z>4, with highly massive black holes. We observed them and a third serendipitous…
We present the results of a multi-frequency, time-averaged analysis of blazars included in the Candidate Gamma-ray Blazar Survey catalog. Our sample consists of 324 $\gamma$-ray detected ($\gamma$-ray loud) and 191 non $\gamma$-ray detected…
Blazars are active galactic nuclei (AGN) whose relativistic jets point nearly to the line of sight. Their compact radio structure can be imaged with very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) on parsec scales. Blazars at extremely high…
Blazars are the brightest and most abundant persistent sources in the extragalactic gamma-ray sky. Due to their significance, they are often observed across various energy bands to explore potential correlations between emissions at…
Historically, the blazar population has been poorly understood at low frequencies because survey sensitivity and angular resolution limitations have made it difficult to identify megahertz counterparts. We used the LOFAR Two-Metre Sky…
The existence of accreting supermassive black holes up to billions of solar masses at early cosmological epochs (in the context of this work, redshifts z>=6) requires very fast growth rates which is challenging to explain. The presence of a…
The most powerful sources among the blazar family are MeV blazars. Often detected at $z>2$, they usually display high X- and \gm-ray luminosities, larger-than-average jet powers and black hole masses $\gtrsim 10^9 M_{\odot}$. In the present…
Bright quasar samples at high redshift are useful for investigating active galactic nuclei evolution. In this study, we describe XQz5, a sample of 83 ultraluminous quasars in the redshift range $4.5 < z < 5.3$ with optical and near-infrared…
Blazars are a highly-variable, radio-loud subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGN). In order to better understand such objects we must be able to easily identify candidate blazars from the growing population of unidentified sources. Working…