The 2009 Fermi Symposium

Fermi AGN: Open Questions and Looking Forward

Lukasz Stawarz, KIPAC/SLAC, Stanford University

Abstract:

As established by Fermi/LAT and the modern Cherenkov Telescopes, active galactic nuclei (AGN) dominate the extragalactic gamma-ray sky. Most of them belong to the blazar class, although non-blazar members of the AGN family have been recently detected in the GeV-TeV energy range as well. There is a general expectation that continuing Fermi observations will establish those new types of active galaxies as possibly quite a numerous population of extragalactic gamma-ray sources in the near future. We also hope that the exquisite data set collected by Fermi/LAT - enabling not only for a detailed and continuous investigation of individual objects, but also for hopefully unbiased population studies in the gamma-ray domain - will help to answer several important yet still open questions regarding the physics of AGN. In this talk I will discuss some of the most pressing open problems in the AGN research, together with the prospects for solving them with Fermi/LAT.