Long-term optical monitoring of TeV emitting Blazars
K. Nilsson, E. Lindfors, L. O. Takalo, R. Reinthal, A. Berdyugin, A. Sillanpää S. Ciprini, A. Halkola, P. Heinämäki, T. Hovatta, V. Kadenius, P. Nurmi, L. Ostor… 展开作者
K. Nilsson, E. Lindfors, L. O. Takalo, R. Reinthal, A. Berdyugin, A. Sillanpää S. Ciprini, A. Halkola, P. Heinämäki, T. Hovatta, V. Kadenius, P. Nurmi, L. Ostorero, M. Pasanen, R. Rekola, J. Saarinen, J. Sainio, T. Tuominen, C. Villforth, T. Vornanen, B. Zaprudin
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27 pages, 70 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics
We present 10 years of R-band monitoring data of 31 northern blazars which were either detected at very high energy (VHE) gamma rays or listed as potential VHE gamma-ray emitters. The data comprise 11820 photometric data points in the R-band obtained in 2002-2012. We analyze the light curves by determining their power spectral density (PSD) slopes assuming a power-law dependence with a single slope $β$ and a Gaussian probability density function (PDF). We use the multiple fragments variance function (MFVF) combined with a forward-casting approach and likelihood analysis to determine the slopes and perform extensive simulations to estimate the uncertainties of the derived slopes. We also look for periodic variations via Fourier analysis and quantify the false alarm probability through a large number of simulations. Comparing the obtained PSD slopes to values in the literature, we find the slopes in the radio band to be steeper than those in the optical and gamma rays. Our periodicity search yielded one target, Mrk 421, with a significant (p<5%) period. Finding one significant period among 31 targets is consistent with the expected false alarm rate, but the period found in Mrk~421 is very strong and deserves further consideration}.
We present a new method for identifying blazar candidates by examining the locus, i.e. the region occupied by the Fermi gamma-ray blazars in the three-dimensional color space defined by the WISE infrared colors. This method is a refinement of our previous approach that made used of the two-dimensional projection of the the distribution of WISE gamma-ray emitting blazars (the Strip) in the three WISE color-color planes. In this paper, we define the three-dimensional locus by means of a Principal Component analysis of the the colors distribution of a large sample of blazars composed by all the R…
We model simultaneous or quasi-simultaneous multi-band spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for a sample of 25 blazars that have radio core-shift measurements, where a one-zone leptonic model and Markov chain Monte Carlo technique are adopted. In the SED fitting for 23 low-synchrotron-peaked (LSP) blazars, the seed photons from broad line region (BLR) and molecular torus are considered respectively in the external Compton process. We find that the SED fitting with the seed photons from the torus are better than those utilizing BLR photons, which suggests that the $γ$-ray emitting region may be…
We study constraints on the population of neutrino emitting blazars imposed by the absence of doublets in astrophysical muon neutrino signal and z>0.3 redshift of nearest identified neutrino-emitting blazar (an order of magnitude further away than the nearest gamma-ray emitting blazar). We show that in spite of the absence of correlation of neutrino arrival directions with positions of gamma-ray emitting blazars, cumulative blazar flux could explain most of astrophysical neutrino flux measured in muon neutrino channel. This is possible if the population of neutrino emitting blazars has experie…
Our goal is to research the upper limits on the extragalactic background light (EBL). The upper limits on the extragalactic background light (EBL), using the Fermi and very high energy (VHE) spectra recently observed in TeV blazars, are presented. We use an assumption that the VHE intrinsic photon index cannot be harder than the Fermi index measured by the Fermi-LAT. Totally, these upper limits on the EBL are compatible with ones given by most of EBL models. However, the models of high EBL density are denied by TeV blazars.
The synergy between the Fermi-LAT and ground-based Cherenkov telescope arrays gives us the opportunity for the first time to characterize the high energy emission (100 MeV - 10 TeV) from more than 30 blazars. In this study we performed a Fermi-LAT spectral analysis for all TeV-detected blazars and combined it with archival TeV spectra. Our results for low synchrotron-peaked BL Lacs (LBL) show hints of absorption features in the GeV band that could be interpreted as internal opacity at the source. We note that simple or broken power laws cannot describe all the observed GeV-TeV spectra and more…
The TeV blazar Markarian 421 underwent multi-TeV flaring during April 2004 and simultaneously observed in x-ray and TeV energies. It was observed that the TeV outbursts had no counterparts in the lower energies, which implies that this might be an orphan flare. In the context of hadronic model, we have shown that this multi-TeV flaring can be produced due to the interaction of Fermi-accelerated protons of energy $\lesssim 168$ TeV with the background photons in the low energy tail of the synchrotron self-Compton spectrum of the blazar jet. We fit very well the flaring spectrum with this model.…
Recently, a new method to constrain the distances of blazars with unknown redshift using combined observations in the GeV and TeV regimes has been developed. The underlying assumption is that the Very High Energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) spectrum corrected for the absorption of TeV photons by the Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) via photon-photon interaction should still be softer than the gamma-ray spectrum observed by Fermi/LAT. The constraints found are related to the real redshifts by a simple linear relation, that has been used to infer the unknown or uncertain distance of blazars. The samp…
The synergy between the Fermi-LAT and ground-based Cherenkov telescope arrays gives us the opportunity for the first time to characterize the high-energy emission from blazars over 5 decades in energy, from 100 MeV to 10 TeV. In this study, we perform a Fermi-LAT spectral analysis for TeV-detected blazars and combine it with archival TeV data. We examine the observational properties in the gamma-ray band of our sample of TeV-detected blazars and compare the results with X-ray and GeV-selected populations. The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) that result from combining Fermi-LAT and ground-…
We present a catalog of radio-loud candidate gamma-ray emitting blazars with WISE mid-infrared colors similar to the colors of confirmed gamma-ray blazars. The catalog is assembled from WISE sources detected in all four WISE filters, with colors compatible with the three-dimensional locus of the WISE gamma-ray emitting blazars, and which can be spatially cross-matched with radio sources from either one of the three radio surveys: NVSS, FIRST and/or SUMSS. Our initial WISE selection uses a slightly modified version of previously successful algorithms. We then select only the radio-loud sources …
Here we report our recent study on the spectral energy distribution (SED) of the high frequency BL Lac object Mrk 421 in different luminosity states. We used a full-fledged chi2-minimization procedure instead of more commonly used "eyeball" fit to model the observed flux of the source (from optical to very high energy), with a Synchrotron-Self-Compton (SSC) emission mechanism. Our study shows that the synchrotron power and peak frequency remain constant with varying source activity, and the magnetic field decreases with the source activity while the break energy of electron spectrum and the Do…
We compile from literature the broadband SEDs of twelve TeV blazars observed simultaneously or quasi-simultaneously with Fermi/LAT and other instruments. Two SEDs are available for each of the objects and the state is identified as a low or high state according to its flux density at GeV/TeV band. The observed SEDs of BL Lac objects (BL Lacs) are fitted well with the synchrotron + synchrotron-self-Compton (syn+SSC) model, whereas the SEDs of the two flat spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) need to include the contributions of external Compton scattering. In this scenario, it is found that the Doppl…
We report on our observations of the parsec-scale radio jet structures of five blazars that have been detected by ground-based TeV gamma-ray telescopes. These five blazars all belong to the class of high-frequency peaked BL Lac objects (HBLs), which are the most common blazar type detected at the TeV energy range. Because of their relative faintness in the radio, these HBLs are not well represented in other radio blazar surveys. Our observations consist of five epochs of Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) imaging from 2006 to 2009, of each of the five blazars 1ES 1101-232, Markarian 180, 1ES 1218…
We present the results obtained from our campaign to characterize the intra-night-optical variability properties of blazars detected by the {\it Fermi} Large Area Telescope. This involves R-band monitoring observations of a sample of 18 blazars, that includes five flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and thirteen BL Lac objects (BL Lacs) covering the redshift range z = 0.085$-$1.184. Our observations, carried out using the 1.3 m J.C. Bhattacharya Telescope cover a total of 40 nights ($\sim$200 hrs) between the period 2016 December and 2020 March. We characterized variability using the power enh…
Over seventy blazars identified as sources of TeV gamma ray emission have been detected, including approximately sixty BL Lac objects and seven flat spectrum radio quasars. The distribution in space of these objects can be described by a luminosity function, which gives their comoving space density as a function of their luminosity. We investigate a source selection method to be used for determining the luminosity function of TeV gamma-ray blazars using observations from VERITAS, a ground-based gamma-ray observatory consisting of an array of four atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes located in sou…
Context. Very high-energy (VHE) $γ$-ray measurements of distant TeV blazars can be nicely explained by TeV spectra induced by ultra high-energy cosmic rays. Aims. We develop a model for a plausible origin of hard spectra in distant TeV blazars. Methods. In the model, the TeV emission in distant TeV blazars is dominated by two mixed components. The first is the internal component with the photon energy around 1 TeV produced by inverse Compton scattering of the relativistic electrons on the synchrotron photons (SSC) with a correction for extragalactic background light absorbtion and the other is…
Motivated by the identification of the blazar TXS 0506+056 as the first promising high-energy neutrino counterpart candidate, we search for additional neutrino blazars candidates among the Fermi-LAT detected blazars. We investigate the multi-wavelength behavior from radio to GeV gamma rays of blazars found to be in spatial coincidence with single high-energy neutrinos and lower-energy neutrino flare candidates. In addition, we compare the average gamma-ray emission of the potential neutrino-emitting sources to the entire sample of gamma-ray blazars. We find that neutrino-emitting blazar candid…
In this work, we use two different methods to determine the opacity of the TeV gamma-rays caused by the extragalactic background light (EBL) via e-e+ production due to photon-photon interaction. The first method, Model-Dependent Approach, uses various EBL models for estimating the opacity as a function of the redshift and energy of the TeV photons. The second method, Model-Independent Approach, relies on using the simultaneous observations of blazars in the MeV-GeV energy range from the Fermi-LAT and in the TeV band from the ground-based gamma-ray telescopes. We make the underline assumption t…
The intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF) in cosmic voids can be indirectly probed through its effect on electromagnetic cascades initiated by a source of TeV gamma rays, such as blazars, a subclass of active galactic nuclei. Blazars that are sufficiently luminous at TeV energies, "extreme TeV blazars", can produce detectable levels of secondary radiation from inverse Compton scattering of the electrons in the cascade, provided that the IGMF is not too large. We reveiw recent work in the literature which utilizes this idea to derive constraints on the IGMF for three TeV-detected blazars-1ES 0229…
The highest-energy blazars exhibit non-thermal radiation extending beyond 1 TeV with high luminosities and strong variabilities, indicating extreme particle acceleration in their relativistic jets. The gamma-ray spectra of blazars contain information about the distribution and cooling processes of high-energy particles in jets, the extragalactic background light between the source and the observer, and potentially, the environment of the gamma-ray emitting region and exotic physics that may modify the opacity of the universe to gamma rays. We use data from Fermi-LAT and VERITAS to study the va…
Fermi-LAT spectra at high energies (HE, 0.1-100 GeV) are often extrapolated to very high energies (VHE, >100 GeV) and considered either a good estimate or an upper limit for the blazars intrinsic VHE spectrum. This assumption seems not well justified, neither theoretically nor observationally. Besides being often softer, observations do indicate that spectra at VHE could be also harder than at HE, even when adopting the limit of Gamma=1.5. Results based on such straightforward GeV-TeV extrapolations are in general not reliable, and should be considered with caution.
We study the applicability of the idea of internal absorption of gamma-rays produced through synchrotron radiation of ultrarelativistic protons in highly magnetized blobs to 1ES 0229+200 and 3C 66A, the two TeV blazars which show unusually hard intrinsic gamma-ray spectra after being corrected for the intergalactic absorption. We show that for certain combinations of reasonable model parameters, even with quite modest energy requirements, the scenario allows a self-consistent explanation of the non-thermal emission of these objects in the keV, GeV, and TeV energy bands.
With the installation of a new 28-m diameter imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescope in the middle of the array, the H.E.S.S. instrument has entered since 2012 into its Phase II. The fifth large-size telescope is particularly important to lower the threshold energy of the array, and is thus a unique instrument to observe low-frequency-peaked blazars, such as flat-spectrum radio-quasars (FSRQs), which remain rare in the very-high- energy (VHE; E $>$ 100 GeV) $γ$-ray domain. In this contribution, we report on the discovery with the H.E.S.S. telescopes of VHE $γ$-ray emission from the FSRQ PKS 07…
Extremely High Synchrotron Peak (EHSP) blazars are observed to form a small population of sources with high energy hump peaking at TeV energies in their broad-band spectral energy distributions. The observed gamma-ray emission from these sources at GeV-TeV energies is described by unusual hard spectral indices. The observed spectral and temporal characteristics of these sources challenge the standard leptonic models for the broad-band emissions from blazars. Therefore, such sources provide astrophysical sites to investigate directly the particle acceleration, cooling of relativistic particles …
We reviewed X-ray flux and spectral variability properties studied to date by various X-ray satellites for Mrk 421 and PKS 2155-304, which are TeV emitting blazars. Mrk 421 and PKS 2155-304 are the most X-ray luminous blazars in the northern and southern hemispheres, respectively. Blazars show flux and spectral variabilities in the complete electromagnetic spectrum on diverse timescales ranging from a few minutes to hours, days, weeks, months and even several years. The flux and spectral variability on different timescales can be used to constrain the size of the emitting region, estimate the …
An updated analysis of a targeted search for high-energy neutrinos from Markarian 421 and Markarian 501 is reported. They are two of the closest and brightest extragalactic sources in the TeV band. In contrast to other types of active galactic nuclei, BL Lacs are characterized by rapid and large-amplitude flux variability. Such radio-loud active galactic nuclei are candidate sources of the observed high-energy cosmic rays. Because their jet is collimated to our line of sight, the hadronic interactions with the surrounding medium can produce an accompanying neutrino and gamma-ray flux. The rece…
In this work, we collected a sample of 69 TeV blazars from TeVCat, obtained their multi-wavelength observations, and fitted their spectral energy distributions by using the second degree polynomial function. The structure parameters of the synchrotron bumps for 68 blazars and those of the inverse-Compton bumps for 56 blzars are obtained. Then, we adopted statistical analysis to the parameters (curvature, peak frequency, peak luminosity, bolometric luminosity, and X/$γ$-ray spectral indexes). From our analysis and discussions, we can get following conclusions: 1. There is a clear positive corre…
The radiation mechanism of very high energy $γ$-ray emission from blazars and crucial parameters like magnetic field, and size of the emitting region are not well understood yet. To understand the above mentioned properties of blazars, we observed five nearby TeV $γ$-ray emitting blazars (Mrk421, Mrk501, 1ES2344+514, 1ES1218+304 and 3C454.3) and one radio galaxy (M87) using the High Altitude GAmma Ray (HAGAR) telescope. HAGAR is an array of seven telescopes located at Hanle, India to detect Cherenkov light caused by extensive air showers initiated by $γ$-rays. Mrk421 was observed to undergo on…
We report on the radio brightening of the blazar TXS 0506+056 (at $z=0.3365$), supporting its identification as source of the high-energy (HE) neutrino IC-170922A by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. MOJAVE/VLBA data indicate its radio brightness abruptly increasing since January 2016. When decomposing the total radio flux density curve (January 2008 - July 2018) provided by the Owens Valley Radio Observatory into eight Gaussian flares, the peak time of the largest flare overlaps with the HE neutrino detection, while the total flux density exhibits a threefold increase since January 2016. We r…
The fast TeV variability of the blazars Mrk 501 and PKS 2155--304 implies a compact emitting region that moves with a bulk Lorentz factor of Gamma_{em}~100 toward the observer. The Lorentz factor is clearly in excess of the jet Lorentz factors Gamma_j\simless 10 measured on sub-pc scales in these sources. We propose that the TeV emission originates from compact emitting regions that move relativistically {\it within} a jet of bulk Gamma_j~10. This can be physically realized in a Poynting flux-dominated jet. We show that if a large fraction of the luminosity of the jet is prone to magnetic diss…
This work is a summary of the X-ray spectral studies of 29 TeV $γ$-ray emitting blazars observed with Swift/XRT, especially focusing on sources for which X-ray regime allows to study the low and the high energy ends of the particle distributions function. Variability studies require simultaneous coverage, ideally sampling different flux states of each source. This is achieved using X-ray observations by disentangling the high-energy end of the synchrotron emission and the low-energy end of the Compton emission, which are produced by the same electron population. We focused on a sample of 29 Te…
We present the results of photometric observations of three TeV blazars, 3C 66A, S5 0954+658 and BL Lacertae, during the period 2013--2017. Our extensive observations were performed in a total of 360 nights which produced $\sim$6820 image frames in BVRI bands. We study flux and spectral variability of these blazars on these lengthy timescales. We also examine the optical Spectral Energy Distributions of these blazars, which are crucial in understanding the emission mechanism of long-term variability in blazars. All three TeV blazars exhibited strong flux variability during our observations. Th…
Context. Based on their overwhelming dominance among associated Fermi gamma ray catalogue sources, it is expected that a large fraction of the unidentified Fermi objects are blazars. Through crossmatching between the positions of unidentified gamma ray sources from the First Fermi Catalog of gamma ray sources emitting above 10 GeV (1FHL) and the ROSAT and Swift XRT catalogues of X ray objects and between pointed XRT observations, a sample of 36 potential associations was found in previous works with less than 15 arcsec of positional offset. One third of them have recently been classified; the …
The broadband SEDs of blazars exhibit two broad spectral components, which in leptonic emission models are attributed to synchrotron radiation and synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) radiation of relativistic electrons. During high state phases, the high-frequency SSC component often dominates the low-frequency synchrotron component, implying that the inverse Compton SSC losses of electrons are at least equal to or greater than the synchrotron losses of electrons. We calculate from the analytical solution of the kinetic equation of relativistic electrons, subject to the combined linear synchrotron …
We report the results of flux and spectral variability studies of all seven {\it Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)} observations of TeV $γ-$ray emitting blazar Markarian (or Mrk) 501. We found strong evidence of intraday variability in 3-79 keV X-ray light curves (LCs) of Mrk 501 during four out of these seven observations. We examined spectral variability using a model-independent hardness-ratio analysis and found a general "harder-when-brighter" behaviour in two observations. We also investigated the nature of 3-79 keV X-ray spectra of TeV blazar Mrk 501 and found that five out …
Gamma-rays propagating through space are likely to be extinguished via electron-positron pair production off of the ambient extragalactic background light (EBL). The spectrum of the EBL is produced by starlight (and starlight reprocessed by dust) from all galaxies throughout the history of the Universe. The attenuation of 40 - 400 GeV gamma-rays has been observed by \textit{Fermi} and used to measure the EBL spectrum over energies 1 eV -10 eV out to redshift $z\sim 1$. Measurements of several TeV blazers are consistent with attenuation, attributed to the EBL at redshift $z\sim 0.1$. Here we si…
The recent spatial and temporal coincidence of the blazar TXS 0506+056 with the IceCube detected neutrino event IC-170922A has opened up a realm of multi-messenger astronomy with blazar jets as a plausible site of cosmic-ray acceleration. After TXS 0506+056, a second blazar, BZB J0955+3551, has recently been found to be spatially coincident with the IceCube detected neutrino event IC-200107A and undergoing its brightest X-ray flare measured so far. Here, we present the results of our multi-frequency campaign to study this peculiar event that includes observations with the NuSTAR, Swift, NICER,…
Extreme TeV blazars (ETBs) are active galactic nuclei with jets presumably pointing towards the observer having their intrinsic spectral energy distributions (SEDs) peaked at an energy in excess of 1 TeV. These sources typically reveal relatively weak and slow variability as well as an extremely high frequency of the low-energy SED peak compared to other classes of blazars. It proved to be exceedingly hard to incorporate all these peculiar properties of ETBs into the framework of a reasonable $γ$-ray emission model. ETB physics have recently attracted great attention in the astrophysical commu…
We investigate the formation of TeV spectrum of a distant blazar PKS 1424+240 residing at a redshift $z\geq0.6$ in two scenarios in the frame of a lepto-hadronic jet model taking both the uncertainties of the extragalactic background light (EBL) and its redshift into account. In the first scenario, TeV emission is attributed to the synchrotron emission of pair cascades resulting from $pγ$ interaction; in the second scenario, TeV emission is attributed to the proton-synchrotron emission, and an internal absorption due to interaction with the photons around the jet is included. The results show …
Attenuation of the TeV gamma-ray flux from distant blazars through pair production with extragalactic background light leads to the development of electromagnetic cascades and subsequent, lower energy, GeV secondary gamma-ray emission. Due to the deflection of VHE cascade electrons by extragalactic magnetic fields (EGMF), the spectral shape of this arriving cascade gamma-ray emission is dependent on the strength of the EGMF. Thus, the spectral shape of the GeV-TeV emission from blazars has the potential to probe the EGMF strength along the line of sight to the object. We investigate constraint…
We report the first results of timing and spectral studies of \textit{Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR)} observations of six TeV emitting high-frequency peaked blazars: 1ES 0347$-$121, 1ES 0414$+$009, RGB J0710$+$591, 1ES 1101$-$232, 1ES 1218$+$304 and H 2356-309. Two out of these six TeV blazars, 1ES 1101$-$232 and 1ES 1218$+$304, showed strong evidence of intraday variations in the 3--79 keV energy range during those observations. We also found a hint of an intraday variability timescale of 23.5 ks in the light curve of 1ES 1218$+$304 using an autocorrelation function analysis. …
Blazars are the most active extragalactic gamma-ray sources. They show sporadic bursts of activity, lasting from hours to months. In this work we present a 10-year analysis of a sample of bright sources detected by Fermi-LAT (100 MeV - 300 GeV). Using 2-week binned lightcurves (LC) we estimated the Duty Cycle (DC): fraction of time that the source spends in an active state. The objects present different DC values, with an average of $22.74\%$ and $23.08 \%$ when considering (and not) the Extragalactic Background Light ( EBL). Additionally we study the so called "blazar sequence" trend for the …
We investigate the position of the radio core in a blazar by multi-epoch astrometric observations at 43 GHz. Using the VLBI Exploration of Radio Astrometry (VERA), we have conducted four adjacent observations in February 2011 and another four in October 2011, and succeeded in measuring the position of the radio core in the TeV blazar Mrk 501 relative to a distant compact quasar NRAO 512. During our observations, we find that (1) there is no positional change within ~0.2 mas or ~2.0 pc de-projected with $\pm1σ$ error for the weighted-mean phase-referenced positions of Mrk 501 core relative to N…
The Fermi-LAT revealed that the census of the gamma-ray sky is dominated by blazars. Looking for a possible connection between radio and gamma-ray emission is a central issue for understanding the blazar physics, and various works were dedicated to this topic. However, while a strong and significant correlation was found between radio and gamma-ray emission in the 0.1-100 GeV energy range, the connection between radio and very high energy (VHE, E>0.1 TeV) emission is still elusive. The main reason is the lack of a homogeneous VHE sky coverage, due to the operational mode of the imaging atmosph…
We propose a scenario for self-consistent interpretation of GeV - TeV spectrum of a distant blazar PKS 1424+240. In this scenario, ultra-high energy (UHE) protons are assumed to exist in the blazar jet and produce gamma rays through synchrotron emission emitted by relativistic protons and pair cascades (resulted from $pγ$ interaction); meanwhile, some of these UHE protons may escape from the jet and are injected into intergalactic space. Therefore, we assume that UHE cosmic rays (CR) originate from relativistic protons in the jet and use energy-independent escape timescale to obtain UHECR inje…
The first ever identification of a cosmic ray accelerator as the consequence of spacial and temporal correlation of IceCube event 170922A with flaring of a blazar TXS 0506+056 motivated us to look for other flaring blazars in Fermi-LAT 3FGL catalog, which could be correlated with IceCube high energy track events. We have studied the Fermi-LAT light curves of blazars correlated with neutrino track events. Among the eight sources identified within 2$σ$ angular uncertainty of the IceCube track events selected in our study, we find only one source 3FGL J2255+2409 was in flaring state during the ne…
Extreme high-energy peaked BL Lac objects (EHBLs) are a new emerging class of blazars. The typical two-hump structured spectral energy distribution (SED) is shifted to higher energies with respect to other more established classes of blazars. Multi-wavelength observations allow us to constrain their synchrotron peak in the medium and hard X-ray bands. Their gamma-ray emission dominates above the GeV gamma-ray band, and in some objects it extends up to several TeV (e.g. 1ES 0229+200). Their hard TeV spectrum is also interesting for the implications on the extragalactic background light indirect…
Despite numerous detections of individual flares, the physical origin of the rapid variability observed from blazars remains uncertain. Using Bayesian blocks and the Eisenstein-Hut HOP algorithm, we characterize flux variations of high significance in the $γ$-ray light curves of two samples of blazars. Daily binned long-term light curves of TeV-bright blazars observed with the First G-APD Cherenkov Telescope (FACT) are compared to those of GeV-bright blazars observed with the Large Area Telescope on board the $Fermi$ Gamma-ray Space Telescope ($Fermi$-LAT). We find no evidence for systematic a…
We briefly review contemporary extragalactic γ-ray propagation models. It is shown that the Extragalactic Magnetic Field (EGMF) strength and structure are poorly known. Strict lower limits on the EGMF strength in voids are of order 10^{-17}--10^{-20} G, thus allowing a substantial contribution of a secondary component generated by electromagnetic cascades to the observable spectrum. We show that this "electromagnetic cascade model" is supported by data from imaging Cherenkov telescopes and the Fermi LAT detector.
Cosmic opacity for very high-energy gamma rays ($E>10$ TeV) due to the interaction with the extragalactic background light can be strongly reduced because of possible Lorentz-violating terms in the particle dispersion relations expected, e.g., in several versions of quantum gravity theories. We discuss the possibility to use very high energy observations of blazars to detect anomalies of the cosmic opacity induced by LIV, considering in particular the possibility to use -- besides the bright and close-by BL Lac Mkn 501 -- extreme BL Lac objects. We derive the modified expression for the optica…
High frequency peaked high redshift blazars, are extreme in the sense that their spectrum is particularly hard and peaks at TeV energies. Standard leptonic scenarios require peculiar source parameters and/or a special setup in order to account for these observations. Electromagnetic cascades seeded by ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) in the intergalactic medium have also been invoked, assuming a very low intergalactic magnetic field (IGMF). Here we study the synchrotron emission of UHECR secondaries produced in blazars located in magnetised environments, and show that it can provide an al…
Collecting experimental insight into the relativistic particle populations and emission mechanisms at work within TeV-emitting blazar jets, which are spatially unresolvable in most bands and have strong beaming factors, is a daunting task. New observational information has the potential to lead to major strides in understanding the acceleration site parameters. Detection of molecular carbon monoxide (CO) in TeV emitting blazars, however, implies the existence of intrinsic gas, a connection often found in photo-dissociated region models and numerical simulations. The existence of intrinsic gas …
The parsec-scale radio properties of blazars detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have been investigated using observations with the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA). Comparisons between LAT and non-LAT detected samples were made using contemporaneous data. In total, 232 sources were used in the LAT-detected sample. This very large, radio flux-limited sample of active galactic nuclei (AGN) provides insights into the mechanism that produces strong gamma-ray emission. It has been found that LAT-detected BL Lac objects are very similar to the non-…
Observations of fast TeV $γ$-ray flares from blazars reveal the extreme compactness of emitting regions in blazar jets. Combined with very-long-baseline radio interferometry measurements, they probe the structure and emission mechanism of the jet. We report on a fast TeV $γ$-ray flare from BL Lacertae observed by VERITAS, with a rise time of about 2.3 hours and a decay time of about 36 minutes. The peak flux at $>$200 GeV measured with the 4-minute binned light curve is $(4.2 \pm 0.6) \times 10^{-6} \;\text{photons} \;\text{m}^{-2}\, \text{s}^{-1}$, or $\sim$180% the Crab Nebula flux. Variabil…
We use Monte Carlo/Fokker-Planck simulations to study the X-ray time lags. Our results show that soft lags will be observed as long as the decay of the flare is dominated by radiative cooling, even when acceleration and cooling timescales are similar. Hard lags can be produced in presence of a competitive achromatic particle energy loss mechanism if the acceleration process operates on a timescale such that particles are slowly moved towards higher energy while the flare evolves. In this type of scenario, the γ -ray/X-ray quadratic relation is also reproduced.
