Blazar jet emission from gradual magnetic dissipation

Oral presentation at the 17th HelAS conference. Abstract: Blazar jets shower us with high energy electromagnetic radiation but their emission region, the “blazar zone”, is uncertain because of the inherent limitation of our head-on view of the jets. Emission models vary in both the acceleration mechanism powering the blazar zone and the latter’s extent and location. Here we have adopted a model of magnetic reconnection that drives continuous energy dissipation throughout the jet, gradually varying the jet plasma magnetization and its bulk Lorentz factor with distance from the central engine. We adapted it to a leptonic code that self-consistently calculates photon emission within spherical blobs (LeHaMoC). This was done by treating the jet as a series of segments which interact with each other through radiative transfer. The effects of that radiation spillage are calculated iteratively throughout the jet, accounting for relativistic effects arising from the relative motion of jet segments, until a steady state is reached. We find that this approach produces some distinct differences in the total spectral energy distribution when compared to simply calculating the emission from each constituent sphere of the jet on its own and then adding them up, and can thus be useful in further modeling of expansive emission regions.