Extremely rapid x-ray flares of tev blazars in the rxte era
S.F. Zhu, Y. Q. Xue, W. N. Brandt, W. Cui, Y. J. Wang

TL;DR
This study systematically analyzed archival X-ray data to discover extremely rapid flares in TeV blazars, revealing sub-minute timescales and spectral properties that challenge existing models of jet emission in active galactic nuclei.
Contribution
It presents the first systematic search for sub-hour X-ray flares in TeV blazars using RXTE data, identifying the shortest AGN flare timescale and providing insights into jet inhomogeneity and emission region sizes.
Findings
PKS 2005-489 exhibits the shortest known AGN flare rise time (<0.5 min).
Flares show consistent hard spectra with photon index 1.7-1.9.
Estimated magnetic field strength in the emission region is 0.1-1.0 G.
Abstract
Rapid flares from blazars in very high energy (VHE) -rays challenge the common understanding of jets of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The same population of ultra-relativistic electrons is often thought to be responsible for both X-ray and VHE emission. We thus systematically searched for X-ray flares at sub-hour timescales of TeV blazars in the entire Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer archival database. We found rapid flares from PKS 2005-489 and S5 0716+714, and a candidate rapid flare from 1ES 1101-232. In particular, the characteristic rise timescale of PKS 2005-489 is less than half a minute, which, to our knowledge, is the shortest among known AGN flares at any wavelengths. The timescales of these rapid flares indicate that the size of the central supermassive black hole is not a hard lower limit on the physical size of the emission region of the flare. PKS 2005-489 shows…
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