Gamma-Ray Observations of Active Galactic Nuclei

Abstract

This article reviews the recent observational results regarding γ-ray emission from active galaxies. The most numerous discrete extragalactic γ-ray sources are AGNs dominated by relativistic jets pointing in our direction (commonly known as blazars), and they are the main subject of the review. They are detected in all observable energy bands and are highly variable. The advent of the sensitive γ-ray observations, afforded by the launch and continuing operation of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the AGILE Gamma-ray Imaging Detector, as well as by the deployment of current-generation Air Cerenkov Telescope arrays such as VERITAS, MAGIC, and HESS-II, continually provides sensitive γ-ray data over the energy range of ∼100 MeV to multi-TeV. Importantly, it has motivated simultaneous, monitoring observations in other bands, resulting in unprecedented time-resolved broadband spectral coverage. After an introduction, in Sections 3, 4, and 5, we cover the current status and highlights of γ-ray observations with (mainly) Fermi but also AGILE and put those in the context of broadband spectra in Section 6. We discuss the radiation processes operating in blazars in Section 7, and we discuss the content of their jets and the constraints on the location of the energy dissipation regions in, respectively, Sections 8 and 9. Section 10 covers the current ideas for particle acceleration processes in jets, and Section 11 discusses the coupling of the jet to the accretion disk in the host galaxy. Finally, Sections 12, 13, and 14 cover, respectively, the contribution of blazars to the diffuse γ-ray background, the utility of blazars to study the extragalactic background light, and the insight they provide for study of populations of supermassive black holes early in the history of the Universe.