Partial Alignment of Astrometric Position Excursions of International Celestial Reference Frame Quasars with Radio Jet Structures

TL;DR

This study analyzes long-term VLBI data of ICRF3 quasars to identify and quantify elongations in their astrometric position distributions, revealing a significant alignment with radio jet structures in nearly half of the sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical method to measure elongation and its orientation in astrometric data, linking position excursions to radio jet directions.

Findings

49% of sources show significant elongation in position distributions.

Nearly 50% of sources with small uncertainties have position excursions aligned with jets.

Elongation and jet alignment are statistically significant in the sample.

Abstract

Published analyses of very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) data for the sources included in the third International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF3) catalog have revealed object-specific, excess astrometric variability and quasi-coherent trajectories as functions of time. A fraction of these sources show markedly elongated distributions of positions on the sky measured with diurnal observations. Here we apply a novel statistical and data-processing method to the diurnal position measurements stretching over 40 years to quantify the degree of elongation and its position angle, for each source with more than 200 data points. We find that 49\% of the examined sources have distribution elongations in excess of 1.3. Robust uncertainties of the directions of maximal astrometric dispersion are computed by the bootstrapping method, and the results are compared with a larger catalog of radio jet directions by Plavin et al. 2022. Nearly one-half of the sources with smaller position angle uncertainties are found to have astrometric position excursions from their mean positions aligned with the radio jet structures within $\pm 30\degr$.