3C273 with Chandra and Spitzer

This page contains figures from our recent papers on observations of the kiloparsec-scale jet of the quasar 3C273, as well as additional material. For enquiries: username jester, email domain phys.soton.ac.uk

Basic facts about 3C273

3C273 is a Quasar, the astronomical term for the intense emission from extremely hot matter that is about to disappear into a black hole. 3C273 is the first object that was called a quasar. See the Chandra Field Guide to 3C273 and Bill Keel's page on the optical jet in 3C273 for previously published pictures. For those who are after more technical details on quasars, see the Lecture Notes on Quasars by Southampton lecturer Dr. Christian Kaiser (at physics/astronomy undergraduate level).

Spitzer material

Chandra material

These are figures from our recently accepted paper New Chandra observations of the jet in 3C273. I. Softer X-ray than radio spectra and the X-ray emission mechanism reporting on deep Chandra observations of 3C273's jet (S. Jester, D.E. Harris, H.L. Marshall, & K. Meisenheimer, ApJ 2006, accepted; available at astro-ph/0605529). Like the Uchiyama figures, they also include data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Very Large Array (VLA).

Image	Description
	False-colour composite showing the relation between the quasar 3C273 (top left; the quasar is really just a very small and bright source, the fuzz apparently surrounding it is an artifact that appears when taking a picture of a very bright source with a camera and telescope for very faint things) and the jet. The colour coding is the same as in the image below. [jpg] [tif] [pdf]
	False-colour composite of 3C273's jet, showing in which wavelength region the emission peaks: X-rays (observed with Chandra) in blue, optical light (observed with HST) in green, radio waves (observed with the VLA) in red. Yellow indicates that both optical and radio emission are strong. The text below the image gives details about two emission models considered in our paper. (This is Figure 5 in the paper.) [jpg] [pdf] [jpg, without text] [tif, without text]
	Individual images of 3C273's jet taken with VLA (bottom), HST (middle) and Chandra (top). Labels show the position angle of the jet, the image scale, and the names of individual features. Boxes indicate the regions for which we determine spectral energy distributions. (Figure 1 in the paper) [jpg] [pdf]
	Spectral energy distributions for each of the jet regions. For the simplest one-zone inverse-Compton model, the dotted line (reflecting the radio spectral index) should agree with the X-ray "bow tie". (Figure 2 in the paper) [jpg] [pdf]
	As one-zone models are ruled out, we consider two possible two-zone models based on a spine-sheath structure for the jet. The two-zone inverse-Compton model appears very unlikely, while the two-zone synchrotron model is more appealing. Other variants of two-zone synchrotron models are also possible. (Figure 4 in the paper) [jpg] [pdf]

Credit These images were created using data obtained by S. Jester, D.E. Harris, H.L. Marshall, K. Meisenheimer, H.-J. Röser, and R. Perley. Please give appropriate credit. In scientific publications, cite Jester et al. 2006, ApJ accepted [astro-ph/0605529].