Related papers: The Blazar sequence and its Physical Understanding
Extreme high-energy peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are an emerging class of blazars. Their typical two-hump structured spectral energy distribution (SED) peaks at higher energies with respect to conventional blazars. Multi-wavelength (MWL)…
The "blazar sequence" posits that the most powerful BL Lacertae objects and flat-spectrum radio quasars should have relatively small synchrotron peak frequencies, nu_peak, and that the least powerful such objects should have the highest…
I describe a general framework that could allow to understand the broad band spectra of blazars and lead to a unified picture of the emission from relativistic jets, in BL Lac objects as well as in flat spectrum, radio loud Quasars. The…
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…
Extreme high-frequency peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are blazars which exhibit extremely energetic synchrotron emission. They also feature non-thermal gamma-ray emission whose peak lies in the very high-energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) range, and…
The hypothesis that AGN jets might be the sources of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays has originally motivated the venture of TeV gamma ray astronomy. Surprisingly, after the discovery of TeV emission from blazars the attention has shifted…
The past 20 years have seen phenomenal progress in our understanding of BL Lac objects. They form part of the blazar class, which are radio-loud AGN whose relativistic jets are aligned along our line of sight. Several critical milestones…
One of the most important questions in blazar physics is the origin of broadband emission and fast-flux variation. In this work, we studied the broadband temporal and spectral properties of a TeV blazar 1ES 1727+502 and explore the one-zone…
Blazars are highly variable, radio-loud active galactic nuclei with jets oriented at a small angle to the line of sight. The observed emission of these sources covers the whole electromagnetic spectrum from radio frequencies up to the high…
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 (100 MeV - 10 TeV) from more than 30 blazars. In this study we performed a…
Blazars are high-energy engines providing us natural laboratories to study particle acceleration, relativistic plasma processes, magnetic field dynamics, black hole physics. Key informations are provided by observations at high-energy (in…
The standard blazar paradigm consists of a supermassive black hole that expels relativistic jets of magnetized plasma in our direction. This plasma entrains nonthermal synchrotron-emitting electrons that furthermore scatter…
Blazars are a subclass of active galactic nuclei with relativistic jets pointing toward the observer. They are notable for their flux variability at all observed wavelengths and timescales. Together with simultaneous measurements at lower…
The overall spectra (SED) of blazars, from radio to gamma-ray energies, seem to obey well defined trends, with a continuity of properties between blazars of different classes. To quantify this statement we can either investigate their…
Blazars, the extreme family of AGN, can be strong gamma-ray emitters and constitute the largest fraction of identified point sources of EGRET. The next Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) is a high energy (30MeV-300GeV) gamma-ray…
Recently, a new method to constrain the distance of blazars with unknown redshift using combined observations in the GeV and TeV regimes has been developed, with the underlying assumption that the Very High Energy (VHE) spectrum corrected…
The extreme variability of blazars, in both timescale and amplitude, is generally explained as the effect of a relativistic jet closely aligned to the observer's line-of-sight. Due to causality arguments, variability characteristics…
The "blazar simplified view" is a new paradigm that explains well the diverse statistical properties of blazars observed over the entire electromagnetic spectrum on the basis of minimal assumptions on blazars' physical and geometrical…
Extreme blazars have exceptionally hard intrinsic X-ray/TeV spectra and extreme peak energies in their spectral energy distribution (SED). Observational evidence suggests that the non-thermal emission from extreme blazars is typically…
The impact of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on blazar research is reviewed. This includes a brief description of the Fermi Large Area Telescope, a summary of the various classes of extragalactic sources found in the First Large Area…