Lunch talk on May. 19, 2025

Where do supermassive black hole jets point?

Speaker: Xuechen Zheng (SHAO)

Venue: SWIFAR Building 2111

Time: 12:45 PM, Monday, May. 19, 2025

Abstract: 

It is well established that active galactic nuclei (AGNs) play an important role in the evolution of galaxies. These AGNs can be linked to the accretion processes onto massive black holes and past merger events in their host galaxies, which may lead to different alignments of the jets with respect to the host galaxies. Based on the LoTSS DR2 and the FIRST survey, we have constructed the largest AGN sample with both reliable radio and optical positional angle (PA) measurements to date in previous work. The PA difference (dPA) distributions for the radio-AGN sample show a prominent minor-axis alignment tendency, which depends on the radio luminosity and the shape of the host galaxies. The observed dPA distribution and be well described by a two-component jet-alignment model in which one component is more aligned with the minor axis of the host galaxy than the other. Now we are expanding the analysis with higher resolution radio data based on the VLASS and VLBI archive data. Higher resolution radio data reveals that the dPA distributions changes with the size of jets, where smaller scale jets show a weaker tendency of jet-galaxy alignment. I will discuss the implications of this dPA-size relation.