An X-ray Imaging Survey of Quasar Jets -- Testing the Inverse Compton Model

Details An X-ray Imaging Survey of Quasar Jets -- Testing the Inverse Compton Model An X-ray Imaging Survey of Quasar Jets -- Testing the Inverse Compton Model

May 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21822814m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #228.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

We present results from continued Chandra X-ray imaging of a flux-limited sample of flat spectrum radio-emitting quasars with jet-like extended structure. X-rays are detected from 24 of the 39 jets observed so far. We compute the distribution of α_rx, the spectral index between the X-ray and radio bands, showing that it is broad, extending at least from 0.8 to 1.2. While there is a general trend that the radio brightest jets are detected most often, it is clear that predicting the X-ray flux from the radio knot flux densities is risky so a shallow X-ray survey is the most effective means for finding jets that are X-ray bright. We test the model in which the X-rays result from inverse Compton (IC) scattering of cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons by relativistic electrons in the jet moving with high bulk Lorentz factor nearly along the line of sight. Depending on how the jet magnetic fields vary with z, the observed X-ray to radio flux ratios do not follow the redshift dependence expected from the IC-CMB model. For a subset of our sample with known superluminal motion based on VLBI observations, we estimate the angles of the kpc-scale jets to the line of sight by considering the additional information in the bends observed between pc- and kpc-scale jets. These angles are sometimes much smaller than estimates based on the IC-CMB model with a Lorentz factor of 15, indicating that these jets may decelerate significantly from pc scales to kpc scales.
Support for this work was provided in part by the NASA through the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) contract SV3-73016 to MIT for support of the Chandra X-Ray Center, which is operated by SAO for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS8-03060.

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