AN X-RAY IMAGING SURVEY OF QUASAR JETS: TESTING THE INVERSE COMPTON MODEL

• Main Authors: Schwartz, D. A. (Author), Murphy, D. W. (Author), Lovell, J. E. J. (Author), Worrall, D. M. (Author), Birkinshaw, M. (Author), Perlman, E. S. (Author), Godfrey, L. E. H. (Author), Jauncey, D. L. (Author), Gelbord, Jonathan (Contributor), Marshall, Herman (Author)
• Other Authors: MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (Contributor), Marshall, Herman Lee (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IOP Publishing, 2015-02-27T16:52:59Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 We present results from continued Chandra X-ray imaging and spectroscopy 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 [subscript 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 a 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 angle of the kiloparsec-scale jet to the line of sight by considering the additional information in the bends observed between parsec- and kiloparsec-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 parsec scales to kiloparsec scales.