Isolating the physical parameters of synchrotron sources

Citations Over TimeTop 21% of 1994 papers

Abstract

We introduce a technique to correct synchrotron brightness maps for their dependence on observing frequency. This correction depends on the shape or "colors" of the synchrotron spectrum and corresponds to the K- correction used for photometry of redshifted galaxies. Using this corrected map and a spectral index map, we are able to isolate the contributions of pairs of the three physical parameters: the number of relativistic electrons along the line of sight, N_T_; the magnetic field strength, B; and a fiducial energy, γ_0_ , that characterizes the electron energy distribution. Thus by constructing maps of N_T_/γ^2^_0_, γ^2^_0_ B, and N_T_ B and looking for differences in the maps of these three quantities, we can, in principle, determine the parameter that dominates the emissivity for a given feature. We have applied this technique to the Carilli et al. (1991) maps of the radio galaxy Cygnus A. The resulting color-corrected map of the eastern lobe is dominated by an edge-brightened channel which straddles the counterjet, is itself girdled by rings, and is seen at low contrast in the original maps. No counterpart to this channel has yet been seen in two-dimensional or three-dimensional jet simulations. Our analysis leads us to conclude that it is dominated by a density enhancement.

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