We obtained the first spectral predictions from a simulation of the Galactic Center to include radiative processes internally. We performed simulations with and without cooling, with and without spin, and for different initial configurations of the magnetic field, in order to test the effect on jet launching and inner accretion disk characteristics. By exploring parameter space, we will attempt to place new constraints on the controversial question about the presence or not of a jet from Sgr A*, as well as study jet launching in general. We have shown that, as expected, the spin of the BH affects the structure of the jet. The presence of cooling also strongly influences the inner structure of the accretion disk and therefore affects jet launching. These results show that radiative cooling is not negligible, as is usually assumed for the very underluminous supermassive BH, Sgr A*. On the contrary, the inclusion of cooling has a very visible influence on the accretion disk. Furthermore it creates an important difference in the resulting spectra.

Cosmos++ (Anninos et al. 2005) is one of the first fully relativistic magneto-hydro-dynamical (MHD) codes that can self-consistently account for radiative cooling, in the optically thin regime. As the code combines a total energy conservation formulation with a radiative cooling function, we have now the possibility to produce spectra energy density from these simulations and compare them to data. In this paper, we present preliminary results of spectra calculated using the same cooling functions from 2D Cosmos++ simulations of the accretion flow around Sgr A*. The simulation parameters were designed to roughly reproduce Sgr A*'s behavior at very low (10−8–10−7 M⊙/yr) accretion rate, but only via spectra can we test that this has been achieved.

The jets image modelling of gravitationally lensed sources have been performed. Several basic models of the lens mass distribution were considered, in particular, a singular isothermal ellipsoid, an isothermal ellipsoid with the core, different multi-components models with the galactic disk, halo and bulge. The obtained jet images were compared as with each other as with results of observations. A significant dependence of the Hubble constant on the model parameters was revealed for B0218+357, when the circular structure was took into account.

The impact of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope on blazar research is reviewed. This includes a brief description of the Fermi Large Area Telescope, a summary of the various classes of extragalactic sources found in the First Large Area Telescope AGN Catalog, and more detailed discussion of the flat spectrum radio quasar 3C454.3 and the BL Lac object PKS 2155-304. Some theoretical studies related to ongoing blazar research with Fermi are mentioned, including implications of γ-ray observations of radio galaxies on blazar unification scenarios, variability in colliding shells, and whether blazars are sources of ultra-high energy cosmic rays.

The question of the collimation of relativistic jets is the subject of a lively debate in the community. We numerically compute the apparent velocity and the Doppler factor of a non homokinetic jet using different velocity profile, to study the effect of collimation on the appearance of relativistic jets (apparent velocity and Doppler factor). We argue that if the motion is relativistic, the high superluminal velocity are possible only if the geometrical collimation is smaller than the relativistic beaming angle γ−1. In the opposite case, the apparent image will be dominated by the part of the jet traveling directly towards the observer resulting in no apparent velocity. Furthermore, getting rid of the homokinetic hypothesis yields a complex relation between the observing angle and the Doppler factor, resulting in important consequences for the numerical computation of AGN population and unification scheme model.

We present long-term numerical simulations of powerful extragalactic relativistic jets in two dimensions. The jets are injected in a realistic atmosphere with powers 1044, 1045 and 1046 erg/s, during tens of Myrs. After this time, the jet injection is switched off. We follow the evolution of the jets and associated shocks from 1 kpc to hundreds of kiloparsecs during more than 100 Myrs. The 1045 erg/s jet was simulated with leptonic and baryonic composition. Our results show that, for powerful jets, the main heating mechanisms are the driving shock-wave and mixing. We discuss the implications that these results have in the frame of cooling flows in clusters.

Jets are found in a variety of astrophysical sources. In all the cases the jet propagates with a supersonic velocity through the external medium, which can be inhomogeneous, and inhomogeneities could penetrate into the jet. The interaction of the jet material with an obstacle produces a bow-like shock within the jet in which particles can be accelerated up to relativistic energies and emit high-energy photons. In this work, we explore the active galactic nuclei scenario, focusing on the dynamical and radiative consequences of the interaction at different jet heights. We find that the produced high-energy emission could be detectable by the current γ-ray telescopes. In general, the jet-clump interactions are a possible mechanism to produce (steady or flaring) high-energy emission in many astrophysical sources in which jets are present.

We present the first applications of a new time-dependent multi-zone jet radiation transfer code to the study the multiwavelength emission of the TeV Blazar Mrk 421. The code couples Fokker-Planck and Monte Carlo methods. For the first time all light travel time effects are fully considered as well as proper self-consistent treatment of Compton cooling, which depends on them. The first tests focus on the March 2001 observations of Mrk 421, still one of the best datasets available for phenomenology and X-ray/TeV data coverage. We summarize the results of scenarios of variability induced by injection of relativistic electrons in a blob encountering a shock, and with different combinations with a second component, either co-spatial or independent from the active region.

Blazars are radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGN) dominated by relativistic jets seen at small angles to the line-of-sight. They exhibit dramatic flux variations across the electromagnetic spectrum. The fastest variations are observed in the X-ray and γ-ray bands on time-scales of hours or even minutes. Currently, a substantial part of the blazar literature has been based on the study of these temporal variations through the use of structure function (SF) analysis, the results of which are believed to put great constrains on the jet-physics.

The SF is often invoked in the framework of shot-noise models to determine the temporal properties of individual shots within the jet as well as their geometrical sizes. We argue, that for blazar variability studies, the SF-results are sometimes erroneously interpreted leading to misconceptions about the actual source properties. Based on extensive simulations we caution that spurious breaks will appear in the SFs of almost all light-curves, even though these light-curves may contain no intrinsic characteristic time-scale.

Finally, it is also commonly thought that SFs are immune to the sampling problems, such as data-gaps, which affects the estimators of the underlying power spectra density function such as the periodogram. However, we show that SFs are also troubled by gaps which can induce artefacts.

The origin of the far-infrared emission from the nearby radio galaxy M87 remains a matter of debate. Some studies find evidence of a far-infrared excess due to thermal dust emission, whereas others propose that the far-infrared emission can be explained by synchrotron emission without the need for an additional dust emission component. We observed M87 with PACS and SPIRE as part of the Herschel Virgo Cluster Survey (HeViCS). We compare the new Herschel data with a synchrotron model based on infrared, submm and radio data to investigate the origin of the far-infrared emission. We find that both the integrated SED and the Herschel surface brightness maps are adequately explained by synchrotron emission. At odds with previous claims, we find no evidence of a diffuse dust component in M87.

One of the most intriguing open questions of today's astrophysics is the jet physical properties and the location and the mechanisms for the production of MeV, GeV, and TeV gamma-rays in AGN jets. M87 is a privileged laboratory for a detailed study of the properties of jets, owing to its proximity, its massive black hole, and its conspicuous emission at radio wavelengths and above. We started on November 2009 a monitoring program with the e-EVN at 5 GHz. We present here results of these multi-epoch observations and discuss the two episodes of activity at energy E>100 GeV that occured in this period. One of these observations was obtained at the same day of the first high energy flare. We added to our results literature data obtained with the VLBI and VLA. A clear change in the proper motion velocity of HST-1 is present at the epoch ~2005.5. In the time range 1998 – 2005.5 the apparent velocity is subluminal, and superluminal (~2.7c) after 2005.5.

Strong and variable radiation detected over all accessible energy bands in blazar arises from a relativistic, Doppler-boosted jet pointing close to our line of sight. Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar 3C 279 was one of the brightest γ-ray blazars in the sky at the time of the discovery with EGRET. Since the successful launch of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space telescope in 2008, we have organized extensive multi-band observational campaign of 3C 279 from radio to γ-ray bands, also including optical polarimetric observations. The uninterrupted monitoring in the γ-ray band by Fermi-LAT together with the multi-band data provide us with new insights of the relativistic jet of blazar. Here, we present the results of the first-year multi-band campaign of 3C 279 including the discovery of a γ-ray flare event associated with a dramatic change of the optical polarization - as well as a discovery of an “orphan” X-ray flare, unassociated with prominent outbursts in other bands.

In 1974 Fanaroff & Riley divided the extended radio sources into two classes, on the basis of their radio morphology and power. For several years we have been collecting basic parameters for extragalactic jets detected in the X-rays, looking for an extension of the classification criterion, based on their radio and X-rays properties. The fact that different processes have been proposed to explain their X-ray radiation, (synchrotron vs inverse Compton emission) suggests the possibility of a new classification scheme. However, comparing the radio-to-X-ray properties of the extragalactic jets, several aspects on their nature became unexpectedly unclear.

In this work, we present the analysis results using UMRAO preliminary data base. We used the light curves 1) to get the shortest timescales and then to get the brightness temperature so that we can estimate the Doppler factors; 2) to investigate the periodicity and discuss the variability index. We also used the data base to discuss the polarization properties of blazars. We found that the periodicity distribution in BL Lacs and that in the flat spectrum radio quasars should be from the same distribution. The Doppler factor in FSRQs is higher than that in BL. The polarization in BLs are higher than that in the flat spectrum radio quasars

We present a lepto-hadronic model for the VHE emission from the relativistic jets of FR I radiogalaxies. We assume that protons and electrons are accelerated in a compact region near the base of the jet, and they cool emitting multiwavelength radiation as they propagate along the jet. The particle distributions are obtained using an inhomogeneous steady-state transport equation that accounts for the cooling processes as well as the convection of particles in the jet. The dominant processes that contribute to the photon SED are electron and proton synchrotron radiation, inverse Compton interactions, and the inelastic collisions pp and pγ. The accompanying neutrino output is obtained and the possibility of detection with Km3Net and IceCube is discussed for the cases of Cen A and M87.

3D-MHD numerical simulations of bipolar, hypersonic, weakly magnetized jets and synthetic synchrotron observations are presented to study the structure and evolution of magnetic fields in FR II radio sources. The magnetic field setup in the jet is initially random. The power of the jets as well as the observational viewing angle are investigated. We find that synthetic polarization maps agree with observations and show that magnetic fields inside the sources are shaped by the jets' backflow. Polarimetry statistics correlates with time, the viewing angle and the jet-to-ambient density contrast. The magnetic structure inside thin elongated sources is more uniform than for ones with fatter cocoons. Jets increase the magnetic energy in cocoons, in proportion to the jet velocity. Both, filaments in synthetic emission maps and 3D magnetic power spectra suggest that turbulence develops in evolved sources.

We used near-IR integral field spectroscopy, obtained with Gemini NIFS and GNIRS integral field units (IFUs), to map the ionized and molecular flux distributions and kinematics in the central few hundreds of parsecs of Seyfert galaxies. We conclude that the molecular gas emission can be considered a tracer of the feeding of the AGN, while the emission of the ionized gas a tracer of its feedback.

Most of jets detected in AGN blazar sources exhibit a morphological structure usually composed by a spatially unresolved core and jet knots receding from it at relativistic velocities. In some cases, the trajectories of the jet components on the plane of the sky seem to be bent, indicating the existence of some kind of acceleration in the respective motion. However, such claims depend strongly on the correct determination of the structural parameters of the jet components, usually obtained from model fitting procedures performed either in the (u,v) or in the image planes. In this work we introduce a new model fitting technique to obtain structural parameters of knots present in VLBI jet images. Our method that is based on the cross-entropy technique minimises an performance function that depends on the sum of the squared residuals obtained from the comparison of an VLBI image and a model image, constructed by summing Ns elliptical Gaussian synthetic sources. We present in this work the cross-entropy model fittings of benchmark images that were built to simulate most of the conditions encountered in typical VLBI images of active galactic nuclei. Besides recovering the parameters of the jet components in all validation tests, our method is able to point out quantitatively the number of the sources present in the image.

Narrow-Line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) class of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) is generally radio-quiet, but a small percent of them are radio-loud. The recent discovery by Fermi/LAT of high-energy γ-ray emission from 4 NLS1s proved the existence of relativistic jets in these systems. It is therefore important to study this new class of γ-ray emitting AGNs. Here we report preliminary results about the observations of the July 2010 γ-ray outburst of PMN J0948+0022, when the source flux exceeded for the first time 10−6 ph cm−2 s−1 (E > 100 MeV).

Jets from accreting black holes appear remarkably similar over eight orders of magnitude in black hole mass, with more massive black holes generally launching more powerful jets. For example, there is an observed correlation, termed the fundamental plane of black hole accretion, between black hole mass, radio luminosity, and X-ray luminosity. Here, we probe the high-mass tail (108–109M⊙) of the accreting black hole distribution with BL Lac objects. We build SEDs for hundreds of SDSS BL Lacs, and we use these SEDs to test the blazar sequence, a proposed anti-correlation between jet power and peak frequency. We then show our BL Lacs fit on the fundamental plane, supporting the non-linear scaling of jet radiation with black hole mass. The subset of BL Lacs considered here compose the largest sample yet used in the above types of studies, reducing potential selection effects and biases.