2012/07/30 by P. Roustazadeh, Roustazadeh, Parisa, Markus Boettcher +1
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Particle Accelerators and Free-Electron Lasers #Particle accelerators and beam dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1207.7091
openalex publication_date 2012/07/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent detections of very-high-energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) gamma-ray blazars which do not belong to the high frequency peaked BL Lac (HBL) class, suggest that gamma-gamma absorption and pair cascading might occur in those objects. In the presence of even weak magnetic fields, these Compton-supported pair cascades will be deflected and contribute to the Fermi gamma-ray flux of radio galaxies. We demonstrate that, in this scenario, the magnetic field can not be determined from a fit of the cascade emission to the gamma-ray spectrum alone, and the degeneracy can only be lifted if the synchrotron emission from the cascades is observed as well. We illustrate this fact with the example of NGC 1275. We point out that the cascade synchrotron emission may produce spectral features reminiscent of the big blue bump observed in the spectral energy distributions of several blazars, and illustrate this idea for 3C 279.