Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

Resolving spectral components of gamma-bright AGN

S. J. Wagner
M. Mohamed

Abstract:

Spectral Energy Distributions of Gamma-ray AGN reveal two broad components. While inverse Compton radiation related to the synchrotron emitting leptonic component is an unavoidable contribution there is an extensive debate about potential contributions by other processes. Furthermore, both the properties of the synchrotron emitting leptons as well as the densities of upscattered photon fields spatially vary within any individual AGN. This suggests that inverse Compton contributions emerging from different locations within any individual AGN add up to the spatially unresolved Gamma-ray emission detected by Fermi and Cherenkov telescopes. We constructed a sample of sources from the 3FGL catalog whose spectral properties suggest a multi-component nature, analyzed the full Fermi data set and amalgamate the resulting spectra with VHE observations. A subset of our sample displays gamma-ray spectra which cannot be produced by single emitting component. We study the variability properties of the different contributions and decompose the gamma-emission in time and energy space. Multifrequency observations are used to associate the different contributions in the overall spectral energy distributions. Inferences for the sample of gamma-ray Blazars will be presented.