Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1997-03-27
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Review talk given at the XXXIInd Rencontres de Moriond, "Very High Energy Phenomena in the Universe", Les Arcs, France (1997),
Scientific paper
Astrophysical models for the high-energy emission of blazars are reviewed. Blazars ejecting relativistic radio jets at small angles to the line-of-sight are the only type of active galactic nuclei (AGN) discovered above 100 MeV. The gamma-rays apparently originate in the jets which explains the absence of gamma-ray pair creation attenuation. The bulk Lorentz factor of the radio jets is much smaller than the Lorentz factors of the emitting particles requiring in situ particle acceleration such as Fermi acceleration at shocks. The mounting evidence for a correlation between the optical and gamma-ray emission argues for the same accelerated electrons emitting the polarized optical synchrotron photons to be responsible for the high-energy emission. Alternatively, the gamma-rays could be due to electrons of a secondary origin related to the energy losses of protons accelerated at the same shocks as the synchrotron emitting electrons. In this case blazars would produce an observable flux of high-energy neutrinos. Unified schemes for AGN predict a circum-nuclear warm dust torus attenuating gamma-rays above ~300 GeV emitted from within a central sphere of radius ~2 10^4 Schwarzschild radii which rules out external Compton scattering models as the origin of the TeV gamma-rays from Mrk421 and Mrk501.
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