Related papers: Blazars
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…
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 discovery of strong gamma-ray and hard X-ray emission and the results from various multifrequency campaigns have disclosed new aspects of the blazar phenomenology, leading to a much more robust understanding of the mechanisms underlying…
In this work, a time-dependent modeling is developed to study the emission properties of blazars in the low state. Motivated by various observations, we speculate and assume that numerous discrete radiation zones throughout the jet of a…
The radiation we observe from blazars is most likely the product of the transformation of bulk kinetic energy into random energy. This process must have a relatively small efficiency (e.g. 10%) if jets are to power the extended…
The current status of leptonic jet models for gamma-ray blazars is reviewed. Differences between the quasar and BL-Lac subclasses of blazars may be understood in terms of the dominance of different radiation mechanisms in the gamma-ray…
With their jet pointing towards us, blazars are ideal tools to study the physics and structure of extragalactic jets. Their powerful jets are cosmic particle accelerators and are alleged to be one of the production sites of the high-energy…
We have recently proposed a new scenario where blazars are classified as flat-spectrum radio quasars or BL Lacs according to the prescriptions of unified schemes, and to a varying combination of Doppler boosted radiation from the jet,…
As powerful gamma-ray engines, blazars -- relativistic plasma jets launched toward Earth from active galactic nuclei -- are manifestly high-energy particle accelerators. Yet, exactly how these jets accelerate particles as well as what they…
We study particle acceleration and radiative processes in Blazar jets under recurring conditions set by gravitational perturbations in supermassive binary systems. We consider the action from a companion orbiting a primary black hole of…
We have not identified for sure what is the mechanism launching, accelerating and collimating relativistic jets. The two most likely possibilities are the gravitational energy of the accreting matter or the rotational energy of a spinning…
The power of blazar jets rivals the power that gravity can extract from accreting matter. The mechanism launching and accelerating jets can be considered as the most efficient engine operating in radio--loud sources. It is still a matter of…
Beppo}SAX contributed substantially to our understanding of the physics of blazars. This has been made possible mainly by its wide energy range and especially by its high energy detector. Together with the information coming from still…
We compute the dynamics and emission of dissipative shells that are subject to a strong Compton drag, under simplifying assumptions about the dissipation mechanism. We show that under conditions prevailing in blazars, substantial…
Observations of blazar jets are shrouded in relativistic effects, thus hindering our understanding of their intrinsic properties and dominant physical processes responsible for their generation, evolution,radiation and particle emission. In…
Blazars are thought to emit highly-collimated outflows, so-called jets. By their close alignment to our line of sight, relativistic beaming effects enable us to observe these jets over the whole electromagnetic spectrum up to TeV energies,…
TeV emission can be a common characteristic of low power blazars. This is in line with the sequence of blazars relating the observed bolometric luminosity with their overall spectral energy distribution. Detecting new TeV blazars, possibly…
We present two ways of modeling the spectral energy distribution of blazars in the hadronic context and discuss the predictions of each "hadronic variant" on the spectral shape, the multi-wavelength variability, the cosmic-ray flux, and 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…
I present an overview of past, present and future research on microquasars and jets, showing that microquasars, i.e. galactic jet sources, are among the best laboratories for high energy phenomena. After remindind the analogy with quasars,…