Testing particle acceleration in blazar jets with continuous high-cadence optical polarization observations
Abstract
Variability can be the pathway to understanding the physical processes in astrophysical jets, however, the high-cadence observations required to test particle acceleration models are still missing. Here we report on the first attempt to produce continuous, >24 hour polarization light curves of blazars using telescopes distributed across the globe and the rotation of the Earth to avoid the rising Sun. Our campaign involved 16 telescopes in Asia, Europe, and North America. We observed BL Lacertae and CGRaBS J0211+1051 for a combined 685 telescope hours. We find large variations in the polarization degree and angle for both sources in sub-hour timescales as well as a ~180 degree rotation of the polarization angle in CGRaBS J0211+1051 in less than two days. We compared our high-cadence observations to Particle-In-Cell magnetic reconnection and turbulent plasma simulations. We find that although the state of the art simulation frameworks can produce a large fraction of the polarization properties, they do not account for the entirety of the observed polarization behavior in blazar jets.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2406.15554,
title = {Testing particle acceleration in blazar jets with continuous high-cadence optical polarization observations},
author = {Ioannis Liodakis and Sebastian Kiehlmann and Alan P. Marscher and Haocheng Zhang and Dmitry Blinov and Svetlana G. Jorstad and Iván Agudo and Erika Benítez and Andrei Berdyugin and Giacomo Bonnoli and Carolina Casadio and Chien-Ting Chen and Wen-Ping Chen and Steven R. Ehlert and Juan Escudero and Tatiana S. Grishina and David Hiriart and Angela Hsu and Ryo Imazawa and Helen E. Jermak and Jincen Jose and Philip Kaaret and Evgenia N. Kopatskaya and Bhavana Lalchand and Elena G. Larionova and Elina Lindfors and José M. López and Callum McCall and Daria A. Morozova and Efthymios Palaiologou and Shivangi Pandey and Juri Poutanen and Suvendu Rakshit and Pablo Reig and Mahito Sasada and Sergey S. Savchenko and Elena Shablovinskaya and Sharma Neha and Manisha Shrestha and Iain A. Steele and Ivan S. Troitskiy and Yulia V. Troitskaya and Makoto Uemura and Andrey A. Vasilyev and Zachary Weaver and Klaas Wiersema and Martin C. Weisskopf},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.15554},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
20 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in A&A. The data used in the paper are available here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IETSXS