English

On the influence of the Sun on the rapid variability of compact extragalactic sources

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2015-05-27 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

Starting from December 2004, a program for the monitoring of intraday variable sources at a frequency of 5 GHz was performed at the Urumqi Observatory. The analysis of the variability characteristics of the flat-spectrum radio source AO 0235+164 revealed the existence of an annual cycle in the variability amplitude. This appears to correlate with the solar elongation of the source. A thorough analysis of the results of the MASIV IDV survey --- which provides the variability characteristics of a large sample of compact radio sources --- confirms that there is a small but detectable component of the observed fractional modulation which increases with decreasing solar elongation. We discuss the hypothesis that the phenomenon is related to interplanetary scintillation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1103.4245,
  title  = {On the influence of the Sun on the rapid variability of compact extragalactic sources},
  author = {N. Marchili and T. P. Krichbaum and X. Liu and H. -G. Song and J. M. Anderson and A. Witzel and J. A. Zensus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.4245},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

10 pages, 12 figures and 2 tables. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics