X-Ray Emission Processes in Radio Jets

By D. Harris, H. Krawczynski. 2001

157 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The emission processes responsible for the observed X-rays from radio jets are commonly believed to be nonthermal, but in any particular case, it is unclear if synchrotron emission or one or more varieties of inverse Compton emission predominates. We present a formulation of inverse Compton emission from a relativistically moving jet ("IC/beaming") that relies on radio-emitting synchrotron sources for which the energy densities in particles and fields are comparable. We include the nonisotropic nature of inverse Compton scattering of the relativistic electrons on photons of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and provide beaming parameters for a number of jets. A list of X-ray-emitting jets is given and the jets are classified on the basis of their morphology and spectral energy distribution to determine their likely emission process. We conclude that these jets have significant bulk relativistic velocities on kiloparsec scales, that higher redshift sources require less beaming because the energy density of the CMB is significantly greater than locally, and that for some nearby sources synchrotron X-ray emission predominates because the jet makes a large angle to the line of sight.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c421a5c29c5a1ab7c56dce9d59f1700d1394b6d9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

X-Ray Emission Properties of Large-Scale Jets, Hot Spots, and Lobes in Active Galactic Nuclei (2004, background): “…optical emission of the largescale jets seem to justify this hypothesis (e.g., Sparks et al. 1995, Scarpa & Urry 2002, Jester 2003), and the usually discussed versions of the EC model for the X-ray jet-knots indeed require the jet bulk Lorentz factors ΓBLK ≥ 10 (e.g., Harris & Krawczynski 2002).”
X-Ray Emission from Extragalactic Jets (2006, background): “Analysis of the spectral energy distributions of several FRII sources shows that electrons with Lorentz factors γ′ ≈ 100 produce the observed X-rays: (e.g. Harris & Krawczynski 2002, eq.”
X-Ray Emission from the Hot Interstellar Medium and Southwest Radio Lobe of the Nearby Radio Galaxy Centaurus A (2003, background): “In most of these cases, the X-ray emission has been attributed to nonthermal process (i.e., inverse-Compton [IC] scattering of a variety of seed photons or synchrotron radiation) from a population of relativistic electrons (Harris & Krawczynski 2002).”
Magnetic Field Strengths in the Hot Spots and Lobes of Three Powerful Fanaroff-Riley Type II Radio Sources (2002, background): “Introduction Chandrahas now detected a large number of X-ray features related to the je s and hotspots of extragalactic radio sources (see Harris & Krawczynski 2002for a recent review).”
Refining the fundamental plane of accreting black holes (2006, background): “For a discussion see Harris & Krawczynski (2002).”