Related papers: Origin of Blazar Activity
Gamma rays have been observed from two blazars at TeV energies. One of these, Markarian 421, has been observed also at GeV energies and has roughly equal luminosity per decade at GeV and TeV energies. Photon-photon pair production on the…
The dissipation of energy flux in blazar jets plays a key role in the acceleration of relativistic particles. Two possibilities are commonly considered for the dissipation processes, magnetic reconnection -- possibly triggered by…
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…
The detection of a high-energy neutrino from the flaring blazar TXS 0506+056 and the subsequent discovery of a neutrino excess from the same direction have strengthened the hypothesis that blazars are cosmic neutrino sources. The lack,…
The distribution of TeV spectral slopes versus redshift for currently known TeV blazars (16 sources with z<0.21, and one with z>0.25) is essentially a scatter plot with hardly any hint of a global trend. We suggest that this is the outcome…
(Abridged) Very high-energy (VHE, $E>100$ GeV) observations of the blazar Mrk 501 with MAGIC in 2014 provided evidence for an unusual narrow spectral feature at about 3 TeV during an extreme X-ray flaring activity. The one-zone…
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…
The new high energy data coming mainly from the Fermi and Swift satellites and from the ground based Cerenkov telescopes are making possible to study not only the energetics of blazar jets, but also their connection to the associated…
There is growing evidence that the estimations of the beaming Doppler factor in TeV BL Lac object based on the Self Synchrotron Compton (SSC) models are in strong disagreement with those deduced from the unification models between blazars…
Most active galactic nuclei at the center of the nearby galaxies have super-massive black holes accreting at sub-Eddington rates through hot accretion flows or radiatively inefficient accretion flows, which efficiently produce jets. The…
The matter content of extragalactic relativistic jets is still an unsolved issue. There are strong arguments against pure electron-positron pair jets, but pairs could outnumber the electrons associated with protons by a factor 10-20. This…
The transient emission produced behind internal shocks that are driven by overtaking collisions of a magnetized, relativistic outflow is considered. A self-consistent model capable of describing the structure and dynamics of the shocks and…
The new results of the evolution of the synchrotron peak for Mrk 421 are mostly likely related to the particle acceleration process. In order to account for the above results, we present a model of blazar variability during the flare in…
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…
Active galactic nuclei come in many varieties. A minority of them are radio-loud, and exhibit two opposite prominent plasma jets extending from the proximity of the supermassive black hole up to megaparsec distances. When one of the…
Black-hole driven relativistic astrophysical jets, such as blazars and gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), are powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation. Their emission is powered by some energy dissipation and particle acceleration mechanism…
Blazar flare data show energy-dependent lags and correlated variability between optical/X-ray and GeV-TeV energies, and follow characteristic trajectories when plotted in the spectral-index/flux plane. This behavior is qualitatively…
We estimate the power of relativistic, extragalactic jets by modelling the spectral energy distribution of a large number of blazars. We adopt a simple one-zone, homogeneous, leptonic synchrotron and inverse Compton model, taking into…
Most models for blazars and gamma-ray bursts involve relativistic plasma outflows powered by accretion processes onto black holes. The blast wave physics developed for cosmological models of GRBs is reviewed. Two points relevant for blazar…
Photon breeding in relativistic jets involves multiplication of high-energy photons propagating from the jet to the external environment and back with the conversion into electron-positron pairs. The exponential growth of the energy density…