Program: GN-2008A-Q-102
Title: | How much energy is input into the IGM by AGN? |
PI: | Katherine Blundell |
Co-I(s): | Andy Fabian, Mary Erlund, Paul Hirst |
Abstract
The overall goal for these observations is to understand how much
energy is input into the IGM from radio jets: this depends on the
*minimum* energy
to which the power-law distribution of relativistic particles is
accelerated in the hotspots, which for decades has been uncertain to
within three orders of magnitude. Indeed, it was impossible for this
minimum energy to be determined while studies of giant radio galaxies
were made solely at radio wavelengths. In the Chandra and XMM era,
dramatic steps forward have been made by the revealing of X-ray
emission from inverse Compton scattering of CMB photons (ICCMB) to keV
energies: this is important because it traces the presence of
relativistic particles with Lorentz factors of 10^3. We propose to make
2.2-micron images (with NIRI) & 450-nm images (with GMOS) of the hotspots
in two examples of giant (~ 1 Mpc) classical double radio sources which
we have been making detailed investigations of
with Chandra, XMM, the Liverpool Telescope, the WHT, the VLA and MERLIN (Blundell
et al 2006, Erlund et al 2007) in order to delineate - at intermediate energies -
the nature of the spectral turnover and energy-loss mechanisms in the hotspots
and hence quantify the energy transported
0.5-Mpc away from their supermassive black holes.
Publications using this program's data
-
[data]
[ADS] Two types of shock in the hotspot of the giant quasar 4C74.26: a high-resolution comparison from Chandra, Gemini and MERLIN