A Flare in the Jet of Pictor A
H. L. Marshall, M.J. Hardcastle, M. Birkinshaw, J. Croston, D. Evans,, H. Landt, E. Lenc, F. Massaro, E. S. Perlman, D. A. Schwartz, A., Siemiginowska, {\L}. Stawarz, C. M. Urry, D.M. Worrall

TL;DR
This paper reports the discovery of a transient X-ray flare in the Pictor A jet, challenging existing models of jet emission due to its rapid variability over a large spatial scale.
Contribution
It presents the first observation of a short-term X-ray flare in a large-scale astrophysical jet, suggesting localized regions with enhanced magnetic fields.
Findings
Detected a flare that faded between 2000 and 2002
The flare was not present in 2009 observations
Variability implies small, magnetically enhanced sub-volumes within the jet
Abstract
A Chandra X-ray imaging observation of the jet in Pictor A showed a feature that appears to be a flare that faded between 2000 and 2002. The feature was not detected in a follow-up observation in 2009. The jet itself is over 150 kpc long and a kpc wide, so finding year-long variability is surprising. Assuming a synchrotron origin of the observed high-energy photons and a minimum energy condition for the outflow, the synchrotron loss time of the X-ray emitting electrons is of order 1200 yr, which is much longer than the observed variability timescale. This leads to the possibility that the variable X-ray emission arises from a very small sub-volume of the jet, characterized by magnetic field that is substantially larger than the average over the jet.
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