Monitoring of gamma-ray blazars with AGILE

TL;DR

This paper reports on AGILE satellite's long-term gamma-ray monitoring of bright blazars, revealing high states, multi-wavelength correlations, and complex emission behaviors that advance understanding of blazar emission mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides new multi-wavelength observational data and analysis of blazar variability, highlighting complex behaviors beyond standard models.

Findings

Detection of several blazars in high gamma-ray states

Multi-wavelength correlations observed across the spectrum

Evidence of complex emission behaviors in some blazars

Abstract

Thanks to the wide field of view of its gamma-ray imager, the AGILE satellite obtained a long term monitoring of the brightest blazars in the sky and during the first 3 years of operation detected several blazars in a high gamma-ray state: 3C 279, 3C 454.3, PKS 1510-089, S5 0716+714, 3C 273, W Comae, and Mrk 421. Through the rapid dissemination of our alerts we were able to obtain also multi-wavelength data from many observatories such as Spitzer, Swift, RXTE, Suzaku, XMM-Newton, INTEGRAL, MAGIC, VERITAS, and ARGO as well as radio-to-optical coverage by means of the MOJAVE project, the GASP project of the WEBT and the REM Telescope. This large coverage over the whole electromagnetic spectrum gave us the opportunity to study the variability correlations between the emission at different frequencies and to build truly simultaneous spectral energy distributions of these sources from radio to gamma-rays, investigating in detail the emission mechanisms of blazars and uncovering in some cases a more complex behaviour with respect to the standard models. We present an overview of the most interesting AGILE results on these gamma-ray blazars and the relative multiwavelength data.