2013/01/24 by Eric Clausen-Brown, Tuomas Savolainen, Clausen-Brown, Eric +7
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #astro-ph.HE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1301.5751
6 pages. Proceedings of the 11th EVN Symposium. Bordeaux (France), October 2012
arxiv created 2013/01/24 · arxiv updated 2013/01/25
We present a new method to measure Gamma*thetaj in flux-limited samples of active galactic nuclei (AGN) jets, where Gamma is the bulk Lorentz factor and thetaj is the jet's half-opening angle. The Gamma*thetaj parameter is physically important for models of jet launching, and also determines the effectiveness of jet instabilities and magnetic reconnection. We measure Gamma*thetaj by analyzing the observed distribution of apparent opening angles in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) flux-limited samples of jets, given some prior knowledge of the active galactic nuclei (AGN) radio luminosity function. We then apply this method to the MOJAVE flux-limited sample of radio loud objects and find Gamma*thetaj = 0.1 +- 0.03, which implies that AGN jets are subject to a variety of physical processes that require causal connection.