Related papers: Are BL Lacertae Objects Beamed QSO Remnants?
Several blazars, and BL Lac objects in particular, show a misalignment between the jet orientation on parsec and kiloparsec scales. Some authors (i.e. Conway & Murphy, 1993) have attempted to explain this behaviour invoking helical jets for…
We present the final results from our deep HST imaging study of the hosts of radio-quiet quasars (RQQs), radio-loud quasars (RLQs) and radio galaxies (RGs). We describe new WFPC2 R-band observations for 14 objects and model these images in…
The existence of accreting supermassive black holes up to billions of solar masses at early cosmological epochs (in the context of this work, redshifts z>=6) requires very fast growth rates which is challenging to explain. The presence of a…
We present very long baseline interferometry polarization images of an X-ray selected sample of BL Lacertae objects belonging to the first High Energy Astronomy Observatory (HEAO-1) and the ROSAT-Green Bank (RGB) surveys. These are…
We have assembled a sample of 37 RLQs that have been imaged with the HST in order to investigate their black hole masses, accretion rates, and the structure of their accretion disks. The black hole masses were estimated from the…
Multi-Messenger observations and theory of astrophysical objects is fast becoming a critical research area in the astrophysics scientific community. In particular, point-like objects like that of BL Lac, flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQ),…
Among active galactic nuclei, BL Lac objects show extreme properties that have been interpreted as the effect of relativistic beaming on the emission from a plasma jet oriented close to the line of sight. The Doppler amplification of the…
Relativistic jets are a common feature of radio loud active galactic nuclei. Multifrequency observations are a unique tool to constrain their physics. We report on a detailed study of the properties of the jet of the nearby BL Lac object…
Recent work on red and blue quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) has identified peculiar number distributions as a function of radio loudness that we explore and attempt to explain from the perspective of a picture in which a subset of the…
The existence of FR II objects that are kinetically dominated, the jet kinetic luminosity, $Q$, is larger than the total thermal luminosity (IR to X-ray) of the accretion flow, $L_{bol}$, is of profound theoretical interest. Such objects…
Studies of radio-loud (RL) broad absorption line (BAL) quasars indicate that popular orientation-based BAL models fail to account for all observations. Are these results extendable to radio-quiet (RQ) BAL quasars? Comparisons of RL and RQ…
The nature of the so-called G objects orbiting the Galactic Center remains unresolved. These sources exhibit compact Br$\gamma$ emission, extreme infrared colors, and remarkable dynamical stability through close passages to the central…
Blazars are the established sources of an intense and variable non-thermal radiation extending from radio wavelengths up to HE and VHE gamma-rays. Understanding the spectral evolution of blazars in selected frequency ranges, as well as…
We investigate the host galaxy luminosities of BL Lac Objects (BLLs) and Radio Loud Quasars (RLQs) at z<0.5 imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). From a homogeneous treatment of the data we construct the host galaxy luminosity…
Fractionally charged quasiparticles in edge states, are expected to condense to a chiral Luttinger liquid (CLL). We studied their condensation by measuring the conductance and shot noise due to an artificial backscatterer embedded in their…
Aims. We aim to determine the redshift (or stringent lower limits) of a number of bright BL Lacs objects. Methods. We secured medium resolution optical and near-infrared spectra of 4 bright BL Lac objects of unknown redshift using the…
Relativistic jets are thought to play a crucial role in the formation and evolution of massive galaxies and supermassive black holes. Blazars, which are quasars with jets aligned along our line of sight, provide insights into the jetted…
Absorption and emission lines in the optical spectrum are typically used to investigate the presence of large-scale environments in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). BL Lac objects - which are a category of AGNs with the relativistic jet…
Our knowledge of the blazar surface densities and luminosity functions, which are fundamental parameters, relies still on samples at relatively high flux limits. As a result, our understanding of this rare class of active galactic nuclei is…
Blazar subclasses ranging from flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) through low-frequency-peaked BL Lac objects (LBLs) to high-frequency-peaked BL Lac objects (HBLs) exhibit a sequence of increasing spectral hardness with decreasing…