The parsec-scale jets of an expanded sample of TEV blazars as seen by the upgraded vlba some supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies generate powerful jets of plasma that point…

The parsec-scale jets of an expanded sample of TEV blazars as seen by the upgraded vlba some supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies generate powerful jets of plasma that point nearly at the earth. Such objects are known as blazars. A few of these blazars, known as the TEV blazars, generate the highest energy gamma-rays in the universe, at energies well over 1 TEV. Many of these TEV blazars are also seen and studied by the fermi gamma-RAY telescope at lower gamma-RAY energies. The physics and the structure of the TEV gamma-RAY emitting regions in these objects remains mysterious, in part because the gamma-RAY telescopes do not have enough magnification to reveal the detailed structure of the blazar on small scales near the central black hole. We will study these TEV blazars using the highest magnification technique available: very long baseline interferometry using the national radio astronomy observatory's very long baseline array (vlba). Because the TEV blazars have relatively faint radio emission, they have not been previously well-studied with this technique. We will take advantage of the recently upgraded sensitivity of the vlba to study nearly the entire catalog of known TEV blazars. We will image a number of these TEV blazars for the first time, on scales of a few hundred times the size of the central supermassive black hole. We will conduct multi-epoch imaging to measure the speeds of the jets, and polarization-sensitive imaging to investigate the magnetic field structures of the jets. These observations will address a number of open questions about the physical properties of TEV blazars, including the speeds of the jets, the length scales over which the jets decelerate, and the detailed transverse structure of the gamma-RAY emitting region and how IT interacts with the regions downstream. Together these observations should significantly improve understanding of a class of fermi blazars that is not yet well-studied.