Extragalactic jets the high energy view.pdfVIP

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 0 4 0 1 5 9 0 v 1 2 8 J a n 2 0 0 4 EXTRAGALACTIC JETS: THE HIGH ENERGY VIEW F. TAVECCHIO Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera-Merate, via Bianchi 46, 23807 Merate, Italy E-mail: tavecchio@merate.mi.astro.it I review the current knowledge of high-energy emission from extragalctic jets. First I discuss γ-ray emission from blazars, which provides us numerous precious infor- mation on the innermost portions of the relativistic jets. I describe the constraints on the dynamics of the jet from the subpc to the pc scale provided by recent VLBI studies of TeV sources, together with the modelling of the emission from the blazar jet. Finally I discuss high energy emission from large scale jets as seen by Chandra and I report on the expected gamma-ray emission from large-scale regions of jets. 1 Introduction The study of relativistic jets has been revitalized in the past 15 years by the dis- covery of their high-energy emission, which in some cases can extend up to the (multi-)TeV band. EGRET onboard CGRO first discovered (e.g. Von Montigny 1995) that blazars, which form the most active class of AGNs, are bright emitters of γ-rays in the MeV-GeV domain. The discovery of such an intense flux of γ-rays definitively confirmed the twenty years old proposal (Blandford Rees 1978) that the emission from blazars, dominated by a smooth non-thermal continuum from ra- dio to γ-rays, is produced within a relativistic jet, pointing close to the line of sight. Indeed, in order to avoid photon-photon absorption (producing electron-positron pairs), the compactness of the source must be small, condition that directly im- plies that the emission is beamed (e.g. Maraschi, Ghisellini Celotti 1992), with values of the Doppler beaming factor δ = [Γ(1 ? β cos θ)]?1 (where Γ is the bulk Lorentz factor of the flow, β = v/c and θ is the viewing angle) larger than 5-10. The subsequent discovery (possible thanks to the advent of atmosferic Cherenkov telescopes) of bright