Session B1 - Poster Presentations.
POSTER session, Friday afternoon, April 05
Buildingway, Gerstenzang Building
Quasars are brilliant and violent nuclei of distant galaxies, whose energy output exceeds that of entire normal galaxies by factors of 10-100. A small fraction of the most powerful quasars are observed to eject well-collimated jets of relativistic plasma which extend out to distances of a few million light years or more. These jets are believed to be powered by the accretion of matter onto a supermassive black hole of 10^8 to 10^9 solar masses in the nucleus.
For over two decades, the Brandeis Radio Astronomy Group has been studying the quasar jet phenomenon from radio to X-ray wavelengths, and with resolution up to 100 times better than that achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope. In particular, we have focused on studies of the jet magnetic fields through mapping the polarized emission, and on following motions close to the black hole where structures are found to be moving at apparent velocities that exceed the speed of light. In this presentation, we highlight our group's most current research activities.