Are Quasar Jets Matter Or Poynting Flux Dominated? [electronic resource]
If quasar jets are accelerated by magnetic fields but terminate as matter dominated, where and how does the transition occur between the Poynting-dominated and matter-dominated regimes? To address this question, we study constraints which are imposed on the jet structure by observations at different...
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Online Access |
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| Format: | Government Document Electronic eBook |
| Language: | English |
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Washington, D.C : Oak Ridge, Tenn. :
United States. Dept. of Energy ; distributed by the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy,
2005.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | If quasar jets are accelerated by magnetic fields but terminate as matter dominated, where and how does the transition occur between the Poynting-dominated and matter-dominated regimes? To address this question, we study constraints which are imposed on the jet structure by observations at different spatial scales. We demonstrate that observational data are consistent with a scenario where the acceleration of a jet occurs within 10³⁻⁴R{sub g}. In this picture, the non-thermal flares--important defining attributes of the blazar phenomenon--are produced by strong shocks formed in the region where the jet inertia becomes dominated by matter. Such shocks may be formed due to collisions between the portions of a jet accelerated to different velocities, and the acceleration differentiation is very likely to be related to global MHD instabilities. Astrophysics,astro. |
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| Item Description: | Published through the Information Bridge: DOE Scientific and Technical Information. 10/03/2005. "slac-pub-11512" "astro-ph/0509685" To appear in the proceedings of Conference on Astrophysical Sources of High Energy Particles and Radiation, Torun, Poland, 20-24 Jun 2005. Sikora, Marek; Madejski, Greg M.; Lasota, Jean-Pierre; Begelman, Mitchell C. |