Observations Unveil the Properties of Neutrino-Emitting Blazar's Jet
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Using the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) technique, astronomers have probed the parsec-scale jet of a neutrino-emitting blazar known as TXS 0506+056.
[...] In general, blazars are perceived by astronomers as high-energy engines serving as natural laboratories to study particle acceleration, relativistic plasma processes, magnetic field dynamics and black hole physics. Therefore, high-resolution observations of blazars and their jets in different wavelengths could be essential for improving the understanding of these phenomena.
At a distance of approximately 5.75 billion light years, TXS 0506+056 is a VHE [(Very High Energy)] blazar that was detected as a radio source in 1983. It is the first known source of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. After the detection of a neutrino event designated IceCube-170922A, coincident with the blazar's direction and arrival time during a gamma-ray flare, an intense multi-wavelength monitoring of this object commenced.
[...] The study found that the blazar's jet structure showcases a helical trajectory originating in growing instabilities, with a precessing period of five to six years. The jet is composed of a core and four components designated J1 to J4. The sizes of the jet components increase with the radial distance from the center, hence the outermost component J1 is the most extended with the largest size, and the innermost J4 has the smallest size.
[...] "The neutrino event detected during the rise of the radio flare could then be associated with the onset of particle injection and acceleration which can contain a large portion of the converted energy density. This scenario provides support to a lepto-hadronic origin of the VHE neutrinos and gamma-ray emission owing to a co-spatial origin at the particle injection and acceleration site," the authors of the paper concluded.
More information: The parsec-scale jet of the neutrino-emitting blazar TXS~0506+056, arXiv:2005.00300 [astro-ph.GA] arxiv.org/abs/2005.00300
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