A study of bent jets in active galactic nuclei at parsec scales

TL;DR

This study analyzes a large dataset of VLBI images to understand the prevalence and characteristics of bent jets in active galactic nuclei at parsec scales, revealing that about 5% exhibit significant curvature.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical analysis of AGN jet bending using multi-frequency VLBI data, which was previously limited to individual cases.

Findings

Approximately 5% of studied AGN show significantly curved jets.

Jets are characterized by fitting intensity ridge lines with simple models.

Possible scenarios explaining jet bending are proposed.

Abstract

Very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) observations show that some active galactic nuclei (AGN) jets exhibit bending even at parsec scales. The nature of bending is comprehensively analysed only for a small number of individual AGN, and the overall trends in shape of the substantially curved jets are unclear. In this work, we analyse outflows in AGN on the basis of publicly available multi-frequency VLBI images. Nearly 73000 images of about 11000 AGN are studied. Our research reveals that about 5% of them show a significantly curved jet structure. We characterize the jets geometry by fitting total intensity ridge lines constructed at all available frequencies and epochs with a set of simple models and suggest possible scenarios explaining the observed bending.