Related papers: Accretion Disks, Jets and Blazar Variability
A fraction of the radiation produced by an accretion disk may be Thomson scattered by a wind flowing away from the disk. Employing a simple plane-parallel model of the wind, we calculate the polarization of the scattered radiation and find…
Nonthermal radiation observed from astrophysical systems containing relativistic jets and shocks, e.g., gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and Galactic microquasar systems usually have power-law emission spectra. Recent…
We select a sample of 10 radio-quiet quasars with confirmed intranight optical variability and with available X-ray data. We compare the variability properties and the broad band spectral constraints to the predictions of intranight…
Relativistic jets are observed only in the low/hard and intermediate states of X-ray binaries (XRBs), and are switched off in the thermal state, but they appear to be present in both low-luminosity and luminous active galactic nuclei…
Relativistic jets from Active Galactic Nuclei are known since decades, but the study of the connection between accretion and ejection in these systems is hampered by the long time scales associated to these events. The past decade has seen…
The generation of relativistic jets in active sources such as blazars is a complex problem with many aspects, most of them still not fully understood. Relativistic jets are likely produced by the accretion of matter and magnetic fields onto…
The spin of supermassive black holes could power jets from active galactic nuclei (AGN), although direct observational evidence for this conjecture is sparse. The accretion disk luminosity and jet power, on the other hand, have long been…
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), both from merger of binary compact objects (short GRBs) and collapse of massive stars (long GRBs), are expected to occur in the dense environments, e.g., the accretion disk of active galactic nuclei (AGN). The…
We report on two surveys of radio-weak AGN to look for radio variability. We find significant variability with an RMS of 10-20% on a timescale of months in radio-quiet and radio-intermediate quasars. This exceeds the variability of radio…
The magnetic field is believed to play a critical role in the bulk acceleration and propagation of jets produced in active galactic nuclei (AGN). Polarization observations of AGN jets provide valuable information about their magnetic…
We treat transformation properties of external radiation fields in the proper frame of a plasma moving with constant speed. The specific spectral energy densities of external isotropic and accretion-disk radiation fields are derived in the…
Various aspects of the high-energy emission from relativistic jets associated wi th compact astrophysical systems are reviewed. The main leptonic and hadronic processes responsible for the production of high-energy $\gamma$-rays, very-high…
We analyze the broadband photometric light curves of Seyfert 1 galaxies from the Sergeev et al. (2005) sample and find that a) perturbations propagating across the continuum emitting region are a general phenomenon securely detected in most…
Transient radio emission from X-ray binaries is associated with synchrotron emission from collimated jets that escape the system, and accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars (AMXPs) are no exception. Although jets from black hole X-ray binaries…
According to the standard model, an active galactic nucleus (AGN) consists of an inner accretion disk with a jet around a central massive black hole, and a number of outer broad line regions (BLRs) and narrow line regions (NLRs). The…
Blazars are well known for the violent variability from the radio to gamma-ray wavelengths. In this paper, we present a brief summary of the X-ray variability recently obtained for TeV blazars. We also point out the probable similarities of…
We present first-epoch, milliarcsecond-scale linear polarization images at 15 GHz of 133 jets associated with AGN in the MOJAVE survey (Monitoring of Jets in Active Galactic Nuclei with VLBA Experiments). The sample consists of all known…
We investigate the temporal variability of polarization of synchrotron radiation from blazar jets. Multiwavelength observations revealed high-amplitude rotations of the electric vector position angle (EVPA), both in the optical and in the…
We present a model that explains some extreme variability phenomena observed in active galactic nuclei (AGN). In this model, an orbiting companion interacts with the accretion disk surrounding the central supermassive black hole (SMBH).…
Plasmas of geometrically thick, black hole (BH) accretion flows in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are generally collisionless for protons, and involve magnetic field turbulence. Under such conditions a fraction of protons can be accelerated…