相关论文: Blazars: recent developments
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…
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…
Blazars are highly variable active galactic nuclei which emit radiation at all wavelengths from radio to gamma-rays. Polarized radiation from blazars is one key piece of evidence for synchrotron radiation at low energies and it also varies…
With their jet pointing towards us, blazars are ideal tools to study the physics and structure of extragalactic jets. Their powerful jets are cosmic particle accelerators and are alleged to be one of the production sites of the high-energy…
The present status of the blazar spectral sequence is discussed, including new findings about blazars selected with different criteria than the original complete radio-samples. Despite extensive searches of blazars "breaking" the sequence,…
The multiwavelength spectra of blazars appear to be dominated by nonthermal emission from a relativistic jet oriented close to the line of sight. The recent detection of many blazars at gamma-ray energies strongly supports this scenario.…
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…
Blazars are high-energy engines providing us natural laboratories to study particle acceleration, relativistic plasma processes, magnetic field dynamics, black hole physics. Key informations are provided by observations at high-energy (in…
The radiation observed by blazars is believed to originate from the transformation of bulk kinetic energy of relativistic jets into random energy. A simple way to achieve this is to have an intermittent central power source, producing…
The extreme variability of blazars, in both timescale and amplitude, is generally explained as the effect of a relativistic jet closely aligned to the observer's line-of-sight. Due to causality arguments, variability characteristics…
I review recent progress in the theory of relativistic jet production. The presently favored mechanism is an electrodynamic one, in which charged plasma is accelerated by electric fields that are generated by a rotating magnetic field. The…
Blazars and Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are the fastest objects known so far. The radiation we see from these sources originates in a jet of similar aperture angle, and we think it is the result of the conversion of some of the jet kinetic…
The observational evidence for jets and phenomena arising from rotation powered radio pulsars is reviewed, including many recent and exciting discoveries at X-ray wavelengths. The well studied jets of the Crab pulsar are summarised,…
The gamma-ray emission of blazar jets shows a pronounced variability and this feature provides limits to the size and to the speed of the emitting region. We study the gamma-ray variability of bright blazars using data from the first 18…
The present status and understanding of the "spectral sequence" of blazars is discussed in the perspective of the upcoming GLAST launch. The vast improvement in sensitivity will allow to i) determine more objectively the "average" gamma-ray…
Blazars represent dominant population of the extragalactic $\gamma$-ray sources in the Universe. These sources exhibit some characteristic properties like strong and non-thermal continuum emission over the entire electromagnetic spectrum…
Accreting black holes produce powerful relativistic plasma jets which emit radiation across all observable wavelengths but the details of the initial acceleration and confinement of the jet are uncertain. We apply an innovative new model…
We discuss the present knowledge about the Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) of blazars within a unified approach emphasizing overall similarities. The properties of the average SEDs of different samples of blazars suggest that more…
The radiation we observe from blazars is most likely the product of the transformation of bulk kinetic energy into random energy. This process must have a relatively small efficiency (e.g. 10%) if jets are to power the extended…
In recent years, blazar surveys at radio and X-ray energies have greatly increased our understanding of this type of active galaxy. The combination of multi-wavelength data has shown that blazars follow a well defined sequence in terms of…