A flare in the jet of Pictor A

Marshall, H.L., Hardcastle, M.J., Birkinshaw, M., Croston, J.H., Evans, D., Landt, H., Lenc, E., Massaro, F., Perlman, E., Schwartz, D.A., Siemiginowska, A., Stawarz, L., Urry, C.M. and Worrall, D.M. (2010) A flare in the jet of Pictor A. Astrophysical Journal Letters (2). L213-L216. ISSN 2041-8213
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A Chandra X-ray imaging observation of the jet in Pictor A showed a feature that appears to be a flare that faded between 2000 and 2002. The feature was not detected in a follow-up observation in 2009. The jet itself is over 150 kpc long and about 1 kpc wide, so finding year-long variability is surprising. Assuming a synchrotron origin of the observed high-energy photons and a minimum energy condition for the outflow, the synchrotron loss time of the X-ray emitting electrons is of order 1200 years, which is much longer than the observed variability timescale. This leads to the possibility that the variable X-ray emission arises from a very small sub-volume of the jet, characterized by a magnetic field that is substantially larger than the average over the jet.

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