Observational View of Magnetic Fields in Active Galactic Nuclei Jets

Abstract

Abstract. According to the currently favored picture, relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei (AGN) are launched in the vicinity of the black hole by magnetic fields extracting energy from the spinning black hole or the accretion disk. In the past decades, various models from shocks to magnetic reconnection have been proposed as the energy dissipation mechanism in the jets. This paper presents a short review on how linear polarization observations can be used to constrain the magnetic field structure in the jets of AGN, and how the observations can be used to constrain the various emission models.

Transport of relativistic jet in the magnetized intergalactic medium

“…The first recorded jet observation is in M87 at 1918 [14]. After a century of dedicated studies, scientists have collected abundant data via state-of-art space telescopes, such as Very Large Array [15] and Very Long Baseline interferometry (VLBI) [16]. Although no consensus has been reached concerning the basic parameters of relativistic jets (e.g.…”