Related papers: Optical spectroscopy of blazars for the Cherenkov …

Very high-energy gamma-ray measurements of distant blazars can be well explained by secondary gamma rays emitted by cascades induced by ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. The secondary gamma rays will enable one to detect a large number of…

Blazars are a kind of active galactic nuclei (AGN) in which a relativistic jet is considered to be directed along the line of sight. They are characterized by strong and rapid variability of the flux and high polarization. We performed a…

The emission of very-high-energy photons (VHE, E>100 GeV$) in blazars is closely connected to the production of ultra-relativistic particles and the role of these gamma-ray sources as cosmic particle accelerators. This work focuses on a…

As a bright gamma-ray source, 3C 66A is of great interest to the high-energy astrophysics community, having a potential for placing cosmological constraints on models for the extragalactic background light (EBL) and the processes which…

Cosmic opacity for very high-energy gamma rays ($E>10$ TeV) due to the interaction with the extragalactic background light can be strongly reduced because of possible Lorentz-violating terms in the particle dispersion relations expected,…

Context. Although Blazars are a small fraction of the overall AGN population they are expected to be the dominant population of extragalactic sources in the hard X-ray and gamma-ray bands and have been shown to be the largest contaminant of…

The addition of a 28 m Cherenkov telescope (CT5) to the H.E.S.S. array extended the experiment's sensitivity to lower energies, providing new opportunities for studies of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) with soft intrinsic spectra and at high…

High energy observations of extreme BL Lac objects, such as 1ES 0229+200 or 1ES 0347-121, recently focused interest both for blazar and jet physics and for the implication on the extragalactic background light and intergalactic magnetic…

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will provide very-high-energy (VHE; >~30 GeV) gamma-ray spectra of unprecedented resolution over a large energy range. It is likely that, at least for bright sources, spectral features will be revealed…

We investigate the properties of the host galaxies of X-ray selected (high frequency peaked) BL Lac objects using a large and homogeneous data set of high spatial resolution R-band observations of 52 BL Lacs in the EMSS and Slew samples.…

We present a sample of 723 optically selected BL Lac candidates from the SDSS DR7 spectroscopic database encompassing 8250 deg^2 of sky; our sample constitutes one of the largest uniform BL Lac samples yet derived. Each BL Lac candidate has…

The CELESTE atmospheric Cherenkov detector ran until June 2004. It has observed the blazars Mrk 421, 1ES 1426+428 and Mrk 501. We significantly improved our understanding of the atmosphere using a LIDAR, and of the optical throughput of the…

We have collected a large amount of multifrequency data for the objects in the Metsahovi Radio Observatory BL Lacertae sample and computed their spectral energy distributions (SED). This is the first time the SEDs of BL Lacs have been…

We present long term optical and near infrared flux variability analysis of 37 blazars detected in the $\gamma$-ray band by the {\it Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope}. Among them, 30 are flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and 7 are BL Lac…

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…

The first three months of sky-survey operation with the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope (Fermi) Large Area Telescope (LAT) reveals 132 bright sources at |b|>10 deg with test statistic greater than 100 (corresponding to about 10 sigma). Two…

A new method to constrain the distance of blazars with unknown redshift using combined observations in the GeV and TeV regimes will be presented. The underlying assumption is that the Very High Energy (VHE) spectrum corrected for the…

The large majority of sources detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are blazars, belonging in particular to the blazar subclass of BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs). BL Lacs often have featureless optical spectra, which make it…

High redshift blazars are among the most powerful non-explosive sources in the Universe and play a crucial role in understanding the evolution of relativistic jets. To understand these bright objects, we performed a detailed investigation…

The addition of a 28 m Cherenkov telescope (CT5) to the H.E.S.S. array extended the experiment's sensitivity to lower energies. The lowest energy threshold is obtained using monoscopic analysis of data taken with CT5, providing access to…