What ignites optical jets?
Abstract
The properties of radio galaxies and quasars with and without optical or X-ray jets are compared. The majority of jets from which high-frequency emission has been detected so far (13 with optical emission, 11 with X-rays, 13 with both) are associated with the most powerful radio sources at any given redshift. It is found that optical/X-ray jet sources are more strongly beamed than the average population of extragalactic radio sources. This suggests that the detection or non-detection of optical emission from jets has so far been dominated by surface brightness selection effects, not by jet physics. It implies that optical jets are much more common than is currently appreciated.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0212397,
title = {What ignites optical jets?},
author = {S. Jester},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0212397},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the workshop "Relativistic jets in the Chandra and XMM Era", Bologna 2002 (New AR); v2: corrected typo in the URL in the footnote on page 1. Unfortunately some change I do not understand has increased the arXiv version of the paper to 5 pages - get v1 to print but get v2 for the corrected URL; v3: corrected typo in typo fix from v2