Chasing the heaviest black holes of jetted Active Galactic Nuclei

Understand

We investigate the physical properties of the 10 blazars at redshift greater than 2 detected in the 3-years all sky survey performed by the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) onboard the Swift satellite.

• We find that the jets of these blazars are among the most powerful known.
• Furthermore, the mass of their central black hole, inferred from the optical-UV bump, exceeds a few billions of solar masses, with accretion luminosities being a large fraction of the Eddington one.
• We compare their properties with those of the brightest blazars of the 3-months survey performed by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) onboard the Fermi satellite.