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Unraveling the Physics of Quasar Jets: Optical Polarimetry, Deep Chandra Observations and Implications for the X-ray Emission Process

Presentation #102.31 in the session AGN Posters.

Published onMay 03, 2024
Unraveling the Physics of Quasar Jets: Optical Polarimetry, Deep Chandra Observations and Implications for the X-ray Emission Process

Since the launch of Chandra , one of the greatest mysteries surrounding Quasar jets is the production mechanism for their extremely high X-ray luminosity. Two mechanisms have been proposed. In the first view, the X-ray emission is inverse-Comptonized CMB photons. This view requires a jet that is highly relativistic (bulk Lorentz factor >20–40) on scales of hundreds of kiloparsecs, and a jet that is comparably or more powerful than the black hole’s Eddington luminosity. The second possibility is synchrotron emission from a high-energy population of electrons. This requires a much less powerful jet that does not need to be relativistically beamed, but it imposes other extreme requirements, namely the need to accelerate particles to >100 TeV energies at distances of hundreds of kiloparsecs from the active nucleus. We are exploring these using deep polarimetry observations from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as deep imaging and low-resolution X-ray spectroscopy from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The HST polarimetry observations reveal new detail in the optical emissions of the jets of 3C 273, PKS 0637-752 and 1150+497. Multiple components in each jet are highly polarized, and there is fascinating detail in the morphology of the polarization vectors for each jet. The Chandra observations reveal new details in their X-ray structure, as well as for the first time spectral indices for individual components in these jets. All of our results strongly favor the hypothesis that the X-ray emission is synchrotron radiation from a separate, high-energy electron population. We investigate the physical processes and magnetic field structures that may help to accelerate particles to such extreme energies.

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