Active galactic nuclei horizons from the gamma-ray perspective

Abstract

Recent results in the field of high energy active galactic nuclei (AGN) astrophysics, benefiting from improvements to gamma-ray instruments and observational strategies, have revealed a surprising wealth of unexpected phenomena. These developments have been brought about both through observational efforts to discover new very high energy gamma-ray emitters, as well as from further in-depth observations of previously detected and well studied objects. I here focus specifically on the discovery of repeated temporal structures observed in AGN lightcurves, and new hard spectral components within the spectral energy distributions of other AGN systems. The challenges that these new features place on the modeling of the sources are highlighted, along with some reflections on what these results tell us about the underlying nature of the emission processes at play.