Related papers: The Blazar sequence and its Physical Understanding
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…
Blazars, a highly energetic subclass of jetted active galactic nuclei, show a broad band spectral energy distribution (SED) with two bumps, resulting from non-thermal jet emission. In 1998, an anticorrelation between the SED luminosity and…
The present status and understanding of the "spectral sequence" of blazars is discussed in the perspective of the upcoming GLAST launch. The vast improvement in sensitivity will allow to i) determine more objectively the "average" gamma-ray…
The present status of the blazar spectral sequence is discussed, including new findings about blazars selected with different criteria than the original complete radio-samples. Despite extensive searches of blazars "breaking" the sequence,…
Blazars are the most violent steady/recurrent sources of high-energy gamma-ray emission in the known Universe. They are prominent emitters of electromagnetic radiation throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The observable radiation…
Since the first TeV blazar Markarian (Mrk) 421 was detected in 1992, the number of established TeV gamma-ray emitting BL Lac objects has grown to 6, with redshifts ranging from 0.031 (Mrk 421) to 0.129 (H 1426+428). The intensive study of…
Since 2002, the number of detected blazars at E_\gamma > 100 GeV has more than doubled. I study all currently known BL Lac-type objects with published energy spectra. Their intrinsic energy spectra are reconstructed by removing…
Blazars are characterized by rapid variability at virtually all wavelengths from radio through TeV gamma-rays. The challenge since their discovery has been to understand the origin of their luminous, apparently nonthermal, nuclear emission.…
This is the first of three plenary talks with the same title given at the 28th ICRC in Tsukuba, Japan in August, 2003. A brief description of the techniques for detecting gamma rays at TeV energies is followed by a summary of the…
Extreme high-energy peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are a new emerging class of blazars. The typical two-hump structured spectral energy distribution (SED) is shifted to higher energies with respect to other more established classes of…
Recent observations of blazars at high energy (HE, 0.1-100 GeV) and very high energy (VHE, >0.1 TeV) have provided important constraints on the intensity and spectrum of the diffuse Extragalactic Background Light (EBL), shedding light on…
The launch of the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope and the imaging air Cerenkov telescopes H.E.S.S., MAGIC, and VERITAS have substantially transformed our knowledge of gamma-ray sources in the last decade. The extragalactic gamma-ray sky is…
Being dominated by non-thermal (synchrotron and inverse Compton) emission from a relativistic jet, blazars offer important clues to the structure and radiative processes in extragalactic jets. Crucial information is provided by blazars'…
Relativistic jets of active galactic nuclei have been known to exist for 100 years. Blazars with their jet pointing close to our line of sight are some of the most variable and extreme objects in the universe, showing emission from radio to…
The synergy between the Fermi-LAT and ground-based Cherenkov telescope arrays gives us the opportunity for the first time to characterize the high-energy emission from blazars over 5 decades in energy, from 100 MeV to 10 TeV. In this study,…
This review paper discusses the past and present observations of gamma-ray blazars with both space and ground-based gamma-ray telescopes (such as EGRET and current TeV telescopes), and with the VLBA. I also discuss the more sensitive…
Blazars, a subset of powerful active galactic nuclei, feature relativistic jets that shine in a broadband electromagnetic radiation, e. g. from radio to TeV emission. Here I present the results of the studies that explore gamma-ray and…
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…
We study the four BL Lac objects (RGB J0152+017, 1ES 0229+200, 1ES 0347-121 and PKS 0548-322) detected in the TeV band but not present in the 1FGL catalogue of the Fermi/Large Area Telescope. We analize the 24 months of LAT data deriving…
Blazars are the most plentiful gamma-ray source at GeV energies, and despite detailed study, there is much that is not known about these sources. In this review I explore some recent results on blazars, including the controversy of the…