Powerful extragalactic jets

TL;DR

Recent advances in high-energy astrophysics have significantly improved our understanding of relativistic extragalactic jets, their formation, composition, and their use as probes of cosmic backgrounds and magnetic fields, especially through observations in X-ray and gamma-ray bands.

Contribution

This paper emphasizes the importance of high-energy X-ray observations for studying powerful blazars and their connection to accretion disks, highlighting new potential for understanding jet physics and black hole properties.

Findings

High-energy X-ray observations are crucial for studying powerful blazars.

Blazars' emission peaks may lie in the MeV band, favoring hard X-ray instruments.

Jets serve as probes for cosmic background radiation and magnetic fields.

Abstract

The Fermi, Swift and INTEGRAL satellites, together with ground based (especially Cherenkov) telescopes made possible a great progress in our understanding of relativistic jets. We can now start to attack the difficult questions of jet formation, collimation and content. We can also used them as probes to quantify the amount of IR and optical background radiation, and the amount of the cosmic magnetic field. Since they are the most powerful steady sources of the Universe, we can study them also at large redshifts, and this is a very fruitful field of research. To this aim, I will emphasize the importance of high energy X-rays, where very powerful blazars are predicted to emit most of their electromagnetic power. For them, the emission of the underlying accretion disk becomes unhidden by the non-thermal jet radiation, allowing to estimate the black hole mass and the accretion rate. In turn, this highlights the connection between the disk and the jet. Since the highest power blazars could have their emission peak in the ~MeV band, hard X-ray instruments could be more appropriate than the Fermi/LAT to detect them.