Related papers: Origin of Blazar Activity
Following the detection of strong TeV gamma-ray flares from the BL Lac object 1ES 1959+650 with the Whipple 10 m Cherenkov telescope on May 16 and 17, 2002, we performed intensive Target of Opportunity (ToO) radio, optical, X-ray and TeV…
Blazars are known for their variability on a wide range of timescales at all wavelengths. Most studies of TeV gamma-ray blazars focus on short timescales, especially during flares. With a decade of observations from the Fermi-LAT and…
Very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray emission from a distant source (z >~0.2) can be efficiently absorbed my means of the electron-positron pair creation process. Analyses of the unabsorbed spectra imply that the intrinsic TeV emission of some…
We study the response of a starved Kerr black hole magnetosphere to abrupt changes in the intensity of disk emission and in the global magnetospheric current, by means of 1D general relativistic particle-in-cell simulations. Such changes…
The occurrence of low-amplitude flux variations in blazars on hourly timescales, commonly known as microvariability, is still a widely debated subject in high-energy astrophysics. Several competing scenarios have been proposed to explain…
Blazars emit a highly-variable non-thermal spectrum. It is usually assumed that the same non-thermal electrons are responsible for the IR-optical-UV emission (via synchrotron) and the gamma-ray emission (via inverse Compton). Hence, the…
Multi-wavelength light curves of bright gamma-ray blazars (e.g., 3C 454.3) reveal strong correlations across wavebands, yet striking dissimilarities in the details. This conundrum can be explained if the variable flux and polarization…
We study the dependence of nonthermal radiation spectra in OVV quasars on location of the low energy break in the electron/positron injection function. We show that the high energy spectra produced during the outbursts are presumably…
We combine the Fermi-LAT light curve of the BL Lacertae type blazar OJ287 with time-dependent multi-waveband flux and linear polarization observations and submilliarcsecond-scale polarimetric images at lambda=7mm to locate the gamma-ray…
Blazars emit non-thermal radiation in all frequency bands from radio to \gamma-rays. Additionally, they often exhibit rapid flaring events at all frequencies with doubling time scale of the TeV and X-ray flux on the order of minutes, and…
We consider implications of high-energy neutrino emission from blazar flares, including the recent event IceCube-170922A and the 2014-2015 neutrino flare that could originate from TXS 0506+056. First, we discuss their contribution to the…
Bursts and flares are among the distinctive observational manifestations of magnetars, isolated neutron stars endowed with an ultra-strong magnetic field ($B \approx 10^{14}$--$10^{15}$ G). It is believed that these events arise in a hot…
We revisit the so called "blazar sequence", which connects the observed bolometric luminosity to the shape of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of blazars. We propose that the power of the jet and the SED of its emission are linked to…
Blazars, supermassive black hole systems (SMBHs) with highly relativistic jets aligned with the line of sight, are the most powerful long-lived emitters of electromagnetic emission in the Universe. We report here on a radio to gamma-ray…
The spectral properties of blazars seem to follow a phenomenological sequence according to the source luminosity. By inferring the source physical parameters through (necessarily) modeling the blazar spectra, we have previously proposed…
There is a large variety in the models explaining blazar flares. Here, we study the flare profile induced by a moving and expanding blob with special emphasize on the gamma-gamma pair production. We first develop a simple semi-analytical…
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…
We show that magnetic reconnection in a magnetically-dominated fast-cooling plasma can naturally produce bright flares accompanied by rotations in the synchrotron polarization vector. With particle-in-cell simulations of reconnection, we…
The 1 - 5 micron diffuse sky emission from which local foreground emission from the solar system and the Galaxy have been subtracted exceeds the brightness that can be attributed to normal star forming galaxies. The nature of this excess…
The Fermi and Swift satellites, together with ground based Cherenkov telescopes, has greatly improved our knowledge of blazars, namely Flat Spectrum Radio Quasars and BL Lac objects, since all but the most powerful emit most of their…