The putative center in NGC 1052
Abstract
Many active galaxies harbor powerful relativistic jets, however, the detailed mechanisms of their formation and acceleration remain poorly understood. To investigate the area of jet acceleration and collimation with the highest available angular resolution, we study the innermost region of the bipolar jet in the nearby low-ionization nuclear emission-line region (LINER) galaxy NGC 1052. We combined observations of NGC 1052 taken with VLBA, GMVA, and EHT over one week in the spring of 2017. For the first time, NGC 1052 was detected with the EHT, providing a size of the central region in-between both jet bases of 250 RS (Schwarzschild radii) perpendicular to the jet axes. This size estimate supports previous studies of the jets expansion profile which suggest two breaks of the profile at around 300 RS and 10000 RS distances to the core. Furthermore, we estimated the magnetic field to be 1.25 Gauss at a distance of 22 {\mu}as from the central engine by fitting a synchrotron-self absorption spectrum to the innermost emission feature, which shows a spectral turn-over at about 130 GHz. Assuming a purely poloidal magnetic field, this implies an upper limit on the magnetic field strength at the event horizon of 26000 Gauss, which is consistent with previous measurements. The complex, low-brightness, double-sided jet structure in NGC 1052 makes it a challenge to detect the source at millimeter (mm) wavelengths. However, our first EHT observations have demonstrated that detection is possible up to at least 230 GHz. This study offers a glimpse through the dense surrounding torus and into the innermost central region, where the jets are formed. This has enabled us to finally resolve this region and provide improved constraints on its expansion and magnetic field strength.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.08685,
title = {The putative center in NGC 1052},
author = {Anne-Kathrin Baczko and Matthias Kadler and Eduardo Ros and Christian M. Fromm and Maciek Wielgus and Manel Perucho and Thomas P. Krichbaum and Mislav Baloković and Lindy Blackburn and Chi-kwan Chan and Sara Issaoun and Michael Janssen and Luca Ricci and Kazunori Akiyama and Ezequiel Albentosa-Ruíz and Antxon Alberdi and Walter Alef and Juan Carlos Algaba and Richard Anantua and Keiichi Asada and Rebecca Azulay and Uwe Bach and David Ball and Bidisha Bandyopadhyay and John Barrett and Michi Bauböck and Bradford A. Benson and Dan Bintley and Raymond Blundell and Katherine L. Bouman and Geoffrey C. Bower and Hope Boyce and Michael Bremer and Christiaan D. Brinkerink and Roger Brissenden and Silke Britzen and Avery E. Broderick and Dominique Broguiere and Thomas Bronzwaer and Sandra Bustamante and Do-Young Byun and John E. Carlstrom and Chiara Ceccobello and Andrew Chael and Dominic O. Chang and Koushik Chatterjee and Shami Chatterjee and Ming-Tang Chen and Yongjun Chen and Xiaopeng Cheng and Ilje Cho and Pierre Christian and Nicholas S. Conroy and John E. Conway and James M. Cordes and Thomas M. Crawford and Geoffrey B. Crew and Alejandro Cruz-Osorio and Yuzhu Cui and Rohan Dahale and Jordy Davelaar and Mariafelicia De Laurentis and Roger Deane and Jessica Dempsey and Gregory Desvignes and Jason Dexter and Vedant Dhruv and Indu K. Dihingia and Sheperd S. Doeleman and Sean Taylor Dougall and Sergio A. Dzib and Ralph P. Eatough and Razieh Emami and Heino Falcke and Joseph Farah and Vincent L. Fish and Edward Fomalont and H. Alyson Ford and Marianna Foschi and Raquel Fraga-Encinas and William T. Freeman and Per Friberg and Antonio Fuentes and Peter Galison and Charles F. Gammie and Roberto García and Olivier Gentaz and Boris Georgiev and Ciriaco Goddi and Roman Gold and Arturo I. Gómez-Ruiz and José L. Gómez and Minfeng Gu and Mark Gurwell and Kazuhiro Hada and Daryl Haggard and Kari Haworth and Michael H. Hecht and Ronald Hesper and Dirk Heumann and Luis C. Ho and Paul Ho and Mareki Honma and Chih-Wei L. Huang and Lei Huang and David H. Hughes and C. M. Violette Impellizzeri and Makoto Inoue and David J. James and Buell T. Jannuzi and Britton Jeter and Wu Jiang and Alejandra Jiménez-Rosales and Michael D. Johnson and Svetlana Jorstad and Abhishek V. Joshi and Taehyun Jung and Mansour Karami and Ramesh Karuppusamy and Tomohisa Kawashima and Garrett K. Keating and Mark Kettenis and Dong-Jin Kim and Jae-Young Kim and Jongsoo Kim and Junhan Kim and Motoki Kino and Jun Yi Koay and Prashant Kocherlakota and Yutaro Kofuji and Shoko Koyama and Carsten Kramer and Joana A. Kramer and Michael Kramer and Cheng-Yu Kuo and Noemi La Bella and Tod R. Lauer and Daeyoung Lee and Sang-Sung Lee and Po Kin Leung and Aviad Levis and Zhiyuan Li and Rocco Lico and Greg Lindahl and Michael Lindqvist and Mikhail Lisakov and Jun Liu and Kuo Liu and Elisabetta Liuzzo and Wen-Ping Lo and Andrei P. Lobanov and Laurent Loinard and Colin J. Lonsdale and Amy E. Lowitz and Ru-Sen Lu and Nicholas R. MacDonald and Jirong Mao and Nicola Marchili and Sera Markoff and Daniel P. Marrone and Alan P. Marscher and Iván Martí-Vidal and Satoki Matsushita and Lynn D. Matthews and Lia Medeiros and Karl M. Menten and Daniel Michalik and Izumi Mizuno and Yosuke Mizuno and James M. Moran and Kotaro Moriyama and Monika Moscibrodzka and Wanga Mulaudzi and Cornelia Müller and Hendrik Müller and Alejandro Mus and Gibwa Musoke and Ioannis Myserlis and Andrew Nadolski and Hiroshi Nagai and Neil M. Nagar and Dhanya G. Nair and Masanori Nakamura and Gopal Narayanan and Iniyan Natarajan and Antonios Nathanail and Santiago Navarro Fuentes and Joey Neilsen and Roberto Neri and Chunchong Ni and Aristeidis Noutsos and Michael A. Nowak and Junghwan Oh and Hiroki Okino and Héctor Raúl Olivares Sánchez and Gisela N. Ortiz-León and Tomoaki Oyama and Feryal Özel and Daniel C. M. Palumbo and Georgios Filippos Paraschos and Jongho Park and Harriet Parsons and Nimesh Patel and Ue-Li Pen and Dominic W. Pesce and Vincent Piétu and Richard Plambeck and Aleksandar PopStefanija and Oliver Porth and Felix M. Pötzl and Ben Prather and Jorge A. Preciado-López and Giacomo Principe and Dimitrios Psaltis and Hung-Yi Pu and Venkatessh Ramakrishnan and Ramprasad Rao and Mark G. Rawlings and Alexander W. Raymond and Angelo Ricarte and Bart Ripperda and Freek Roelofs and Alan Rogers and Cristina Romero-Cañizales and Arash Roshanineshat and Helge Rottmann and Alan L. Roy and Ignacio Ruiz and Chet Ruszczyk and Kazi L. J. Rygl and Salvador Sánchez and David Sánchez-Argüelles and Miguel Sánchez-Portal and Mahito Sasada and Kaushik Satapathy and Tuomas Savolainen and F. Peter Schloerb and Jonathan Schonfeld and Karl-Friedrich Schuster and Lijing Shao and Zhiqiang Shen and Des Small and Bong Won Sohn and Jason SooHoo and León David Sosapanta Salas and Kamal Souccar and Joshua S. Stanway and He Sun and Fumie Tazaki and Alexandra J. Tetarenko and Paul Tiede and Remo P. J. Tilanus and Michael Titus and Pablo Torne and Teresa Toscano and Efthalia Traianou and Tyler Trent and Sascha Trippe and Matthew Turk and Ilse van Bemmel and Huib Jan van Langevelde and Daniel R. van Rossum and Jesse Vos and Jan Wagner and Derek Ward-Thompson and John Wardle and Jasmin E. Washington and Jonathan Weintroub and Robert Wharton and Kaj Wiik and Gunther Witzel and Michael F. Wondrak and George N. Wong and Qingwen Wu and Nitika Yadlapalli and Paul Yamaguchi and Aristomenis Yfantis and Doosoo Yoon and André Young and Ken Young and Ziri Younsi and Wei Yu and Feng Yuan and Ye-Fei Yuan and J. Anton Zensus and Shuo Zhang and Guang-Yao Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.08685},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
22 pages, 10 figures, published in A&A