Kinetic powers of the relativistic jets in Mrk 421 and Mrk 501

TL;DR

This study estimates the kinetic powers of jets in Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 using a combined MCMC and semi-analytical approach within the SSC model, revealing insights into black hole spins and jet energy losses.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytical method combined with MCMC to better estimate jet powers and account for model degeneracies in blazar spectral analysis.

Findings

Jets are powered by rapidly rotating black holes.

Energy losses are significant for jet propagation and large-scale structure formation.

Jet energy losses are more prominent in Mrk 501 than in Mrk 421.

Abstract

Using the standard one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model and the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique, we systematically analyze the quasi-simultaneous multi-wavelength (MWL) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 during states of relatively low activity. With this model in place, a semi-analytical method is developed to examine the uncertainty in jet power estimation caused by degeneracy of the radiative models. The semi-analytical method, in combination with the MCMC technique, allows us to explore the jet properties over a wide range of the variability timescale. Our results seem to support: (1) In both Mrk 421 and Mrk 501 the jets are powered by rapidly rotating black holes (BHs). The BH spin in Mrk 501 could be lower than that in Mrk 421 or possibility they are equal under the assumption of Blandford-Znajek mechanism. (2)The energy losses, which could be used to form the large-scale radio structure, are important for reconciling the differences of the kinetic power derived from the observations of the large-scale structure and the SED fitting results. Moreover, the jet energy losses in the propagation are more significant for Mrk 501 than for Mrk 421.