[AGN, Quasars, Black Holes -- Invited ]
Resolved Jet Structures
Dan Schwartz, SAO
The half arcsecond resolution of the Chandra X-ray observatory
has enabled an entire field of study: X-ray jets.The very first target of the Chandra observatory, intended for use in
focusing the telescope, surprisingly revealed a rich jet structure on a
scale of ten arcsec. X-ray jets are seen in a wide variety of astronomical
systems, including stars, neutron star pulsars, black hole binaries,
radio galaxies spanning the full range of radio power, and quasars.
Especially notable are radio sources in clusters of galaxies, whose jets
reverse the cooling flows of the hot intracluster gas, and quasars,
whose jets maintain relativistic velocities up to a Mpc away from the
quasar core. The latter offer the intriguing possibility of revealing
the most distant supermassive black holes via the interaction of the jet
with the cosmic microwave background.