Piner, Glenn

The Parsec-Scale Structure of the Fainter TeV Blazars.

Author list: B. Glenn Piner and Philip G. Edwards

We expand our VLBA studies of TeV-detected HBLs by presenting first-epoch VLBA images of eight new TeV blazars, making a total of 21 TeV-detected HBLs in our VLBA monitoring program. The jets in these sources are fundamentally different from the more powerful blazar jets, and they are not well-studied by other VLBA programs. The newly detected TeV blazars tend to be faint in the radio, but  all eight of these new sources were successfully detected and imaged at 8 GHz, and all eight had at least one measurable jet component. The peak flux densities of these sources range from 5 to 35 mJy. Statistics from the entire sample of TeV HBLs that we have imaged with the VLBA will be presented and discussed, in the context of relativistic jet models. Although the TeV gamma-ray emission is apparently highly beamed, none of these TeV HBLs has yet shown evidence for extremely high Doppler factors or Lorentz factors in their parsec-scale radio jets.