Non-radial motion in the TeV blazar S5 0716+714 The pc-scale kinematics of a BL Lac Object

TL;DR

This study reanalyzes VLBI data of the blazar S5 0716+714, revealing non-radial jet component motions and potential links between flux variability and jet kinematics, suggesting geometric effects influence long-term variability.

Contribution

It introduces an alternative kinematic model showing apparent stationarity and non-radial motion of jet components, with implications for understanding blazar variability.

Findings

Jet components are stationary in core separation but move non-radially.

A possible correlation exists between radio flux variability and jet kinematics.

Most TeV blazars, including S5 0716+714, exhibit subluminal motion.

Abstract

For the BL Lac object S5 0716+714 conflicting apparent velocities of jet component motion have been reported in the literature. This object is an intra-day variable source and suited to investigate a possible correlation between kinematic properties and flux-density variability on different timescales. We (re-)analyze 50 VLBI observations obtained with the VLBA at 5 different frequencies (5 to 43 GHz) between 1992.73 and 2006.32. We analyze the jet component motion in detail taking care not only to account for motion in the radial but also in the orthogonal direction. We study the evolution of the jet ridge line and search for correlations between radio band light curves and the kinematic properties of the jet components. We present an alternative kinematic scenario for jet component motion in S5 0716+714 with apparent stationarity of jet components (with regard to their core separation) with time. Jet components, however, do seem to move significantly non-radially with regard to their position angle and in a direction perpendicular to the major axis of the jet. We discuss a possible correlation between the long-term radio flux-density variability and the kinematics. We conclude that a geometric contribution to the origin of the long-term variability might not be negligible. Subluminal motion has been reported for most of the TeV blazars. Our analysis also confirms this for S5 0716+714. This result increases the number of TeV blazars showing apparent subluminal motion to 7.