Quasar jet emission model applied to the microquasar GRS 1915+105

Abstract

The true nature of the radio emitting material observed to be moving relativistically in quasars and microquasars is still unclear. The microquasar community usually interprets them as distinct clouds of plasma, while the extragalactic community prefers a shock wave model. Here we show that the synchrotron variability pattern of the microquasar GRS 1915+105 observed on 15 May 1997 can be reproduced by the standard shock model for extragalactic jets, which describes well the long-term behaviour of the quasar 3C 273. This strengthens the analogy between the two classes of objects and suggests that the physics of relativistic jets is independent of the mass of the black hole. The model parameters we derive for GRS 1915+105 correspond to a rather dissipative jet flow, which is only mildly relativistic with a speed of 0.60 c. We can also estimate that the shock waves form in the jet at a distance of about 1 AU from the black hole.

accepted for publication in A&A Letters

References in corpus (10)

• MERLIN observations of relativistic ejections from GRS 1915+105
• An unusually massive stellar black hole in the Galaxy
• AU-Scale Synchrotron Jets and Superluminal Ejecta in GRS 1915+105
• An unstable central disk in the superluminal black-hole X-ray binary GRS 1915+105
• A unified model for the spectral variability in GRS 1915+105
• Hard X-ray states and radio emission in GRS 1915+105
• Evidence for a Disk-Jet Interaction in the Microquasar GRS 1915+105
• Repeated Relativistic Ejections in GRS 1915+105
• On the optical extinction and distance of GRS 1915+105
• Modelling Oscillations in the Jet Emission from Microquasar GRS 1915+105

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• Short Timescale Evolution of the Polarized Radio Jet during V404 Cygni's 2015 Outburst
• Extending the "Energetic Scaling of Relativistic Jets From Black Hole Systems" to Include $\gamma$-ray-loud X-ray Binaries
• VLBI Observation of Microquasar Cyg X-3 during an X-ray State Transition from Soft to Hard in the 2007 May-June Flare
• Multiple synchrotron self-Compton modeling of gamma-ray flares in 3C 279