Completion 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…

Completion 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 are continuing our previous study of these TEV blazars using the highest magnification technique available: very long baseline interferometry using the national radio astronomy observatorys very long baseline array (vlba). Because the TEV blazars have relatively faint radio emission, they have not been previously well studied with this technique by other investigators. We are taking advantage of the recently upgraded sensitivity of the vlba to study nearly the entire catalog of known TEV blazars. In our prior work, we imaged a number of these faint TEV blazars for the first time, on scales of a few hundred times the size of the central supermassive black hole. We are now following up these earlier images with multi-epoch imaging to measure the apparent speeds of the jets, and polarization-sensitive imaging to investigate the magnetic field structures of the jets. This work will complete measurements of jets structures and speeds for nearly every blazar detected at TEV energies. 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.