Blazar Relativistic Jets

I worked with Professor Meg Urry and Dr. Lea Marcotulli to use real data from blazars to show the proposed relationship between viewing angle and the apparent luminosity. The Unified theorem of AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) explains that many different types of AGN are just AGN pointed at different angles relative to us. Relativistic beaming is one of the phenomena that contributes to AGN appearing different. When an AGN is pointed close to our line of sight, it appears unusually bright. These unusually bright AGN are referred to as Blazars. By constraining the process of relativistic beaming, we improve the ability to compare other AGN to blazars. 

Recently, papers have performed analysis of radio jets over time to calculate the angles of blazars and their Doppler factors (a value resulting from the velocity and angle of the jet). We used flux data from Fermi and SWIFT-BAT to calculate the luminosities of the blazars. Jet Speed and Redshift were confounding factors that affected the apparent luminosity, and thus, we controlled for them.

Through this research, I learned to work with Python and perform data analysis and error propagation. I learned how to work with new fitting algorithms like orthogonal distance reduction. I also developed an understanding of physics behind relativistic beaming and the cosmology behind luminosity distance calculations. 

Our results showed there was a negative correlation between the angle away from our line of sight, and the apparent luminosity of the AGN as expected. We also recovered the expected power law correlation between doppler factor and luminosity. There is however a lot of scatter in the data which comes from the impreciseness of viewing angle measurements and that there isn't a large number of blazars with information on angles to work with. 

Link to Paper