Understanding Blazar Jets - The OVRO 40-m Blazar Monitoring Program

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The project is centred round the radio monitoring of 1500 Blazars with the 40-m telescope at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory (OVRO, California, USA) and then producing a joint analysis with Fermi gamma ray data. Blazars are powered by accretion onto rotating super-massive black holes which create relativistic jets along the spin axis, though the detailed mechanism of this process still remains elusive. The jets in Blazars are aligned at a small angle to the line of sight, with the result that relativistic beaming dramatically boosts the apparent luminosity and variability. One avenue for progressing our understanding of jet production is provided by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which continuously monitors all gamma-ray bright Blazars, allowing an unprecedented opportunity for the systematic study of Blazar jets. The exact location of the gamma-ray emission region and its proximity to the central black hole remain subjects of debate, with two main competing classes of models for the GeV emission region. Testing these models requires a multiwavelength approach, combining the Fermi observations with supporting radio observations from OVRO-40m to search for correlations in the light curves at different frequencies.