Related papers: Effects of non-continuous inverse Compton cooling …
High-energy emission (from the X-ray through the gamma-ray band) of Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars is widely associated with the inverse Compton (IC) scattering of ambient photons, produced either by the accretion disk or by the Broad Line…
Blazars may accelerate protons and/or nuclei as well as electrons. The hadronic component of accelerated particles in blazars may constitute the bulk of their high-energy budget; nevertheless, this component is elusive due to a high value…
We present the first observations at medium-hard X-rays with ASCA in 1998 August--November of four Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars (FSRQs), characterized by unusually steep soft X-ray spectra (photon index, \Gamma_{0.2-2.4 keV} \sim 2-2.5), as…
We study the quasi-simultaneous Spectral Energy Distributions (SED) of 48 LBAS blazars, collected within three months of the Fermi LAT Bright AGN Sample (LBAS) data taking period, combining Fermi and Swift data with radio NIR-Optical and…
Although the physical origin of gamma-ray burst (GRB) prompt emission is still controversial, synchrotron radiation from accelerated electrons is a promising mechanism. It is believed that electrons are accelerated continuously by…
Blazar emission models based on magnetic reconnection succeed in reproducing many observed spectral and temporal features, including the short-duration luminous flaring events. Plasmoids, a self-consistent by-product of the tearing…
(abridged) We present a new time-dependent multi-zone radiative transfer code and its application to study the SSC emission of Mrk 421. The code couples Fokker-Planck and Monte Carlo methods, in a 2D geometry. For the first time all the…
(abridged) Models of many astrophysical gamma-ray sources assume they contain a homogeneous distribution of electrons that are injected as a power-law in energy and evolve by interacting with radiation fields, magnetic fields and particles…
We examine the effect of Compton drag on the dynamics of a relativistic shock wave. Similarity solutions describing a radiation-supported shock are obtained for certain profiles of the external radiation intensity and the density of the…
We study the variability of the thermal (accretion disc) and non-thermal (jet) emission of thirteen flat spectrum radio quasars in the optical and near infrared (OIR) regime using light curves spanning years with an average sampling of…
Extended high-energy(>100MeV) gamma-ray emission that lasts much longer than the prompt sub-MeV emission has been detected from quite a few gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) by Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) recently. A plausible scenario is that…
Theories of high energy radiation production in quasar jets can be verified by studies of both time-averaged spectra and variability patterns. While the former has been explored extensively, the latter is in its infancy. In this paper, we…
We are presenting a detailed parameter study of the time-dependent electron injection and kinematics and the self-consistent radiation transport in jets of intermediate and low-frequency peaked BL Lac objects. Using a time-dependent,…
We find that energy losses due to synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) emission in blazar jets can produce distinctive signatures in the time-averaged synchrotron and SSC spectra of these objects. For a fairly broad range of particle injection…
Blazars are characterized by large amplitude and fast variability, indicating that the electron distribution is rapidly changing, often on time scales shorter than the light crossing time. The emitting region is sufficiently compact to let…
We present a new assessment of the contribution of Blazars to the extragalactic background radiation across the e.m. spectrum. Our calculations rely on deep Blazar radio counts that we derived combining several multifrequency surveys. The…
We study the spectrum of high frequency radiation emerging from mildly dissipative photospheres of long-duration gamma-ray burst outflows. Building on the results of recent numerical investigations, we assume that electrons are heated…
The phenomenology of gamma-ray bright blazars can be accounted for by a sequence in the source power and intensity of the diffuse radiation field surrounding the relativistic jet. Correspondingly, the equilibrium particle distribution peaks…
We test different physically motivated models for the spectral shape of the $\gamma$-ray emission in a sample of 128 blazars with known redshifts detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) at energies above 50 GeV. The first nine…
Does the "blazar sequence" exist, or is it a result of a selection effect, due to the difficulty in measuring the redshifts of blazars with both high synchrotron peak frequencies (\gtrsim 10^{15} Hz) and luminosities (\gtrsim 10^{46} erg…