Liodakis, Ioannis;
Marscher, Alan P;
Agudo, Iván;
Berdyugin, Andrei V;
Bernardos, Maria I;
Bonnoli, Giacomo;
Borman, George A;
... Zane, Silvia; + view all
(2022)
Polarized blazar X-rays imply particle acceleration in shocks.
Nature
, 611
(7937)
pp. 677-681.
10.1038/s41586-022-05338-0.
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Abstract
Most of the light from blazars, active galactic nuclei with jets of magnetized plasma that point nearly along the line of sight, is produced by high-energy particles, up to around 1 TeV. Although the jets are known to be ultimately powered by a supermassive black hole, how the particles are accelerated to such high energies has been an unanswered question. The process must be related to the magnetic field, which can be probed by observations of the polarization of light from the jets. Measurements of the radio to optical polarization-the only range available until now-probe extended regions of the jet containing particles that left the acceleration site days to years earlier1-3, and hence do not directly explore the acceleration mechanism, as could X-ray measurements. Here we report the detection of X-ray polarization from the blazar Markarian 501 (Mrk 501). We measure an X-ray linear polarization degree ΠX of around 10%, which is a factor of around 2 higher than the value at optical wavelengths, with a polarization angle parallel to the radio jet. This points to a shock front as the source of particle acceleration and also implies that the plasma becomes increasingly turbulent with distance from the shock.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Polarized blazar X-rays imply particle acceleration in shocks |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s41586-022-05338-0 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05338-0 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | X-Rays, Radiography, Acceleration, Aircraft, Cell Nucleus |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Space and Climate Physics |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10160826 |
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