THE STRUCTURE OF THE M87 JET: A TRANSITION FROM PARABOLIC TO CONICAL STREAMLINES

By K. Asada, M. Nakamura. 2011

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The structure of the M87 jet, from milliarcsecond to arcsecond scales, is extensively investigated, utilizing the images taken with the European VLBI Network, MERLIN, and Very Long Baseline Array. We discover that the jet maintains a parabolic streamline over a range in size scale equal to 105 times the Schwarzschild radius. The jet then transitions into a conical shape farther downstream. This suggests that the magnetohydrodynamic jet is initially subjected to the confinement by the external gas which is dominated by the gravitational influence of the supermassive black hole. Afterward the jet then freely expands with a conical shape. This geometrical transition indicates that the origin of the HST-1 complex may be a consequence of the overcollimation of the jet. Our result suggests that when even higher angular resolution is provided by a future submillimeter very long baseline interferometry experiments, we will be able to explore the origin of active galactic nucleus jets.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f28394e7c56da7e4480681dc50d3d90ff04408bb

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Citations in the corpus

The Structure and Dynamics of the Subparsec Jet in M87 Based on 50 VLBA Observations over 17 Years at 43 GHz (2018, background): “The average expansion is consistent with the parabolic expansion found by Asada & Nakamura (2012) to apply out to HST-1, and the initial parabolic expansion found by Hada et al. (2013) inside 300RS.”
The black hole accretion code (2016, methodology): “energy tensor Wij was introduced for example in (23). It reads just as in special relativity Wij:= i j T = ˆh 2vivj EiEj BiBj+ p+ 1 2 (E2 + B2) ij (26) = Sivj+ p tot ij BiBj 2 (Bkv k)v iBj: (27) Correspondingly, the covariant three-momentum density in the Eulerian frame is S i:= i n T = ˆh 2v i”
Kinematics of the jet in M 87 on scales of 100–1000 Schwarzschild radii (2016, methodology): “To test this hypothesis we also include to the fit the speed measured at HST-1 by Giroletti et al. (2012), assuming rHST-1 = 26 mas (Asada & Nakamura 2012).”