A giant radio jet ejected by an ultramassive black hole in a single-lobed radio galaxy

Abstract

We report the discovery of a very unusual, highly asymmetric radio galaxy whose radio jet, the largest yet detected, emits strongly polarized synchrotron radiation and can be traced all the way from the galactic nucleus to the hot spot located ~440 kpc away. This jet emanates from an extremely massive black hole (>10^9 solar mass) and forms a strikingly compact radio lobe. No radio lobe is detected on the side of the counterjet, even though it is similar to the main jet in brightness up to a scale of tens of kiloparsecs. Thus, contrary to the nearly universal trend, the brightness asymmetry in this radio galaxy increases with distance from the nucleus. With several unusual properties, including a predominantly toroidal magnetic field, this Fanaroff-Riley type II megajet is an exceptionally useful laboratory for testing the role of magnetic field in jet stabilization and radio lobe formation.

Published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 670, L85-L88, 2007

References in corpus (5)

• The Relation between Black Hole Mass, Bulge Mass, and Near-Infrared Luminosity
• A new list of extra-galactic radio jets
• On the Jet Activity in 3C 273
• Confronting X-ray Emission Models with the Highest-Redshift Kiloparsec-scale Jets: the z=3.89 Jet in Quasar 1745+624
• Testing Models of the Individual and Cosmological Evolutions of Powerful Radio Galaxies

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• CHANG-ES VIII: Uncovering Hidden AGN Activity in Radio Polarization
• Decoding the giant extragalactic radio sources
• The magnetohydrodynamic instability of current-carrying jets
• The asymmetric radio structure and record jet of giant quasar 4C34.47
• The Expanded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope
• Extragalactic HI 21-cm absorption line observations with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope
• Barbell-shaped giant radio galaxy with ~100 kpc kink in the jet
• Unveiling the 100 pc scale nuclear radio structure of NGC 6217 with e-MERLIN and the VLA
• Low-frequency High-resolution Radio Observations of the TeV-emitting Blazar SHBLJ001355.9-185406
• A (likely) X-ray jet from NGC6217 observed by XMM-Newton