On the two main classes of Active Galactic Nuclei
Astrophysics of Galaxies
2017-07-26 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
Abstract
Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are traditionally divided empirically into two main classes: "radio-loud" and "radio-quiet" sources. These labels, which are more than fifty years old, are obsolete, misleading, and wrong. I argue that AGN should be classified based on a fundamentally physical rather than just an observational difference, namely the presence (or lack) of strong relativistic jets, and that we should use the terms "jetted" and "non-jetted" AGN instead.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1707.08069,
title = {On the two main classes of Active Galactic Nuclei},
author = {Paolo Padovani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.08069},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
Author's version of Nature Astronomy Comment. 5 pages, 1 figure. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0194