Related papers: How is the blazar GeV emission really produced?
We will present a summary of the observations of blazars by the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO). EGRET has detected high energy gamma-ray emission at energies greater than 100 MeV…
The discovery of rapid and simultaneous TeV/optical (UV, X-ray) variability provides strong evidence against the interaction between a thermal radiation field produced by an accretion flow and relativistic electrons in a jet as the origin…
We develop a model for a possible origin of hard very high energy spectra from a distant blazar. In the model, both the primary photons produced in the source and secondary photons produced outside the source contribute to the observed high…
We calculate the very high energy (sub-GeV to TeV) inverse Compton emission of GRB afterglows. We argue that this emission provides a powerful test of the currently accepted afterglow model. We focus on two processes: synchrotron…
M87 is the first extragalactic source detected in the TeV gamma-ray domain that is not a blazar, its large scale jet not being aligned to the line of sight. We present here a multi-blob synchrotron self-Compton model accounting explicitly…
We model light curves of flares observed in blazars, assuming that they are produced by relativistic electrons/positrons injected by forward-reverse shocks traveling down the jet with relativistic speeds. We approximate the radiating region…
The very high energy (VHE) $\gamma$-ray spectra of some TeV Blazars, after being corrected for absorption in the extragalactic background light (EBL), appear unusually hard, which poses challenges to conventional acceleration and emission…
The detections of X-ray emission from the kiloparsec-scale jets of blazars and radio galaxies may imply the existence of high energy electrons in these extended jets, and these electrons could produce high energy emission through inverse…
We extend our approach of modeling spectral energy distribution (SED) and lightcurves of blazars to include external Compton (EC) emission due to inverse Compton scattering of an external anisotropic target radiation field. We describe the…
Several high-frequency peaked BL Lac objects such as Mrk 501 are strong TeV emitters. However, a significant fraction of the TeV gamma rays emitted are likely to be absorbed in interactions with the diffuse IR background, yielding…
The very hard $\gamma$-ray spectrum from distant blazars challenges the traditional synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model, which may indicate that there is the contribution of an additional high-energy component beyond the SSC emission. In…
Observations of very-high-energy (VHE, E > 250 GeV) gamma-ray emission from several blazars at z > 0.1 have placed stringent constraints on the elusive spectrum and intensity of the intergalactic infrared background radiation (IIBR).…
The recent Cherenkov telescope observations and detections of the BL Lac objects Mkn 421, Mkn 501, 1ES 2344+514, PKS 2155--304 and possibly 1ES 1959+658 have shown that there exists a subclass of BL Lac objects emitting a substantial…
Compton scattering of external radiation by nonthermal particles in outflowing blazar jets is dominated by accretion-disk photons rather than scattered radiation to distances $\sim 0.01-0.1$ pc from the central engine for standard…
The non-thermal spectra of jetted active galactic nuclei show a variety of shapes in their low- and high energy components. In some of the brightest Fermi-LAT blazars, prominent spectral breaks at a few GeV have been regularly detected,…
In this work we investigate the nature of multi-wavelength variability of blazars from a purely numerical approach. We use a time-dependent one-zone leptonic blazar emission model to simulate multi-wavelength variability by introducing…
The MAGIC collaboration recently reported the detection of the quasar 3C279 at > 100 GeV gamma-ray energies. Here we present simultaneous optical (BVRI) and X-ray (RXTE PCA) data from the day of the VHE detection and discuss the…
The jets of powerful blazars propagate within regions relatively dense of radiation produced externally to the jet. This radiation is a key ingredient to understand the origin of the high energy emission of blazars, from the X-ray to the…
The gamma-ray emission in blazars can be attributed to the leptonic Synchrotron Self-Compton (SSC) model, photo-hadronic interactions, or a combination thereof. While evidence supports both models, their specific contributions remain…
The detection in 10 bursts of an optical counterpart emission (i.e. during the prompt GRB phase) that is 10-10000 brighter than the extrapolation of the burst spectrum to optical frequencies suggests a synchrotron self-Compton origin for…