Flaring Patterns in Blazars

Abstract

Blazars radiate from relativistic jets launched by a supermassive black hole along our line of sight; the subclass of FSRQs exhibits broad emission lines, a telltale sign of a gas-rich environment and high accretion rate, contrary to the other subclass of the BL Lacertae objects. We show that this dichotomy of the sources in physical properties is enhanced in their flaring activity. The BL Lac flares yielded spectral evidence of being driven by further acceleration of highly relativistic electrons in the jet. Here we discuss spectral fits of multi-lambda data concerning strong flares of the two flat spectrum radio quasars 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 recently detected in gamma rays by the AGILE and Fermi satellites. We find that optimal spectral fits are provided by external Compton radiation enhanced by increasing production of thermal seed photons by growing accretion. We find such flares to trace patterns on the jet power - electron energy plane that diverge from those followed by flaring BL Lacs, and discuss why these occur.

6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (8)

• Five-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Likelihoods and Parameters from the WMAP data
• Fast TeV variability in blazars: jets in a jet
• The power of blazar jets
• A change in the optical polarization associated with a gamma-ray flare in the blazar 3C 279
• Modeling the Emission Processes in Blazars
• Spine-sheath layer radiative interplay in subparsec-scale jets and the TeV emission from M87
• X-ray spectral evolution of TeV BL Lac objects: eleven years of observations with BeppoSAX, XMM-Newton and SWIFT satellites
• Signatures of synchrotron emission and of electron acceleration in the X-ray spectra of Mrk 421

Cited by in corpus (14)

• Blazar Flaring Patterns (B-FlaP): Classifying Blazar Candidates of Uncertain type in the third Fermi-LAT catalog by Artificial Neural Networks
• On the multi-wavelength Emission from CTA 102
• Multiwavelength Study of High-Redshift Blazars
• Comparing 3C 120 jet emission at small and large scales
• High Energy Gamma-Ray Emission From PKS 1441+25
• The Intrinsic Properties of Multiwavelength Energy Spectra for Fermi Teraelectronvolt Blazars
• Modeling the Broadband Emission of 3C 454.3
• The Bright $\gamma$-ray Flare of 3C 279 in June 2015: AGILE Detection and Multifrequency Follow-up Observations
• The $\gamma$-ray sky seen at X-ray energies I. Searching for the connection between X-rays and $\gamma$-rays in Fermi BL Lac objects
• Constraints on the location of the gamma-ray emission region for the gamma-ray-loud radio source GB 1310+487
• Optical and Gamma-Ray Variability Behaviors of 3C 454.3 from 2006 to 2011
• The Connection between Radio and Gamma Ray Emission in Fermi/LAT Blazars
• Two active states of the narrow-line gamma-ray-loud AGN GB 1310+487
• Constraining Evolution of Magnetic Field Strength in Dissipation Region of Two BL Lac Objects