High Energy Observations of AGN Jets and their Future Prospects

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent high-energy observations of AGN jets, highlighting advances from X-ray missions like Suzaku and Chandra, and discusses future prospects with upcoming gamma-ray observatories such as GLAST.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent observational results on AGN jets across multiple scales and discusses how upcoming missions will enhance understanding of jet physics.

Findings

Evidence for shock acceleration in sub-pc jets

Insights into particle content in jets

Detection of neutral iron-line features in some radio galaxies

Abstract

In next five years, dramatic progress is anticipated for the AGN studies, as we have two important missions to observe celestial sources in the high energy regime: GLAST and Suzaku. In this talk, I will summarize recent highlights in studies of AGN jets, focusing on the high-sensitivity X-ray observations that may shed new light on the forthcoming GLAST era. I will especially present some examples from most recent Suzaku observations of blazars, which provides important hints for the shock acceleration in sub-pc scale jets, as well as particle content in jets. Then I will focus on the neutral iron-line feature observed in some broad line radio galaxies, as a probe of jet launching and/or the disk-jet connection. Finally, I will discuss new results of large scale (kpc to Mpc) jets recently resolved with Chandra X-ray observatory. Simultaneous monitoring observations in various wavelengths will be particularly valuable for variable blazar sources, allowing the cross correlations of time series as well as detailed modeling of the spectral evolution between the X-ray and gamma-ray energy bands. Possible impacts of these new observations across the electromagnetic spectrum on various spatial scales are discussed to challenge the long-standing mystery of AGN jet sources.