Physics Main Calendar

View Full Calendar

Astrophysics, Gravitation and Cosmology Seminar - Tom Maccarone (Texas Tech) "Understanding relativistic jets through multi-wavelength time variability"

Event Type
Seminar/Symposium
Sponsor
Department of Physics
Virtual
wifi event
Date
Mar 30, 2022   12:00 pm  
Speaker
Tom Maccarone (Texas Tech)
Contact
Brandy Koebbe
E-Mail
bkoebbe@illinois.edu
Views
20
Originating Calendar
Physics - Astrophysics, Relativity, and Cosmology Seminar

Relativistic jets are one of the phenomena in astronomy that link a wide range of other phenomena.  They start from among the smallest scales in astrophysics, with links to the inner regions of accretion flows onto a compact objects, and in some cases produce cosmologically relevant feedback.  Understanding how these jets are produced and why they radiate is one of the major challenges in magnetohydrodynamic theory, but it is also a problem that has traditionally suffered from insufficient observational constraints.  Ideally, one wants to obtain detailed studies of jets structures and spectra, over a wide range of environments.  A major challenge is that the viscous times in the accretion disks of active galactic nuclei are generally too long to allow individual AGN to be studied over a wide range of accretion rates, while the jets from stellar mass black holes and neutron stars are either unresolved or barely resolved.  Over the past decade, and especially in the past few years, new approaches have been developed to take advantage of the variability of jets from X-ray binaries to place new constraints on the structure of the emission regions.  I will discuss the current state of the art, which consists of making use of time lags between different wavelength ranges, mostly between X-rays and either infrared or radio.  I will also discuss future possibilities for jet variability studies, both jet eclipses, and expansions of the range of wavelengths over which lags can be measured, that will be opened up by new X-ray timing facilities, and facilities like JWST, ngVLA and CMB S4.

link for robots only