The Discovery of Extended Thermal X-ray Emission from PKS 2152-699: Evidence for a `Jet-cloud' Interaction

Abstract

A Chandra ACIS-S observation of PKS 2152-699 reveals thermal emission from a diffuse region around the core and a hotspot located 10" northeast from the core. This is the first detection of thermal X-ray radiation on kiloparsec scales from an extragalactic radio source. Two other hotspots located 47" north-northeast and 26" southwest from the core were also detected. Using a Raymond-Smith model, the first hotspot can be characterized with a thermal plasma temperature of 2.6$\times 10^6$ K and an electron number density of 0.17 cm${}^{-3}$. These values correspond to a cooling time of about 1.6$\times 10^7$ yr. In addition, an emission line from the hotspot, possibly Fe xxv, was detected at rest wavelength 10.04Å. The thermal X-ray emission from the first hotspot is offset from the radio emission but is coincident with optical filaments detected with broadband filters of HST/WFPC2. The best explanation for the X-ray, radio, and optical emission is that of a `jet-cloud' interaction. The diffuse emission around the nucleus of PKS 2152-699 can be modeled as a thermal plasma with a temperature of 1.2$\times 10^7$ K and a luminosity of 1.8$\times 10^{41}$ erg s${}^{-1}$. This emission appears to be asymmetric with a small extension toward Hotspot A, similar to a jet. An optical hotspot (EELR) is seen less than an arcsecond away from this extension in the direction of the core. This indicates that the extension may be caused by the jet interacting with an inner ISM cloud, but entrainment of hot gas is unavoidable. Future observations are discussed.

To appear in the Astrophysical Journal 21 pages, 5 Postscript figures, 1 table, AASTeX v. 5.2

References in corpus (4)

• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Preliminary Maps and Basic Results
• X-ray Emission Processes in Radio Jets
• INTEGRAL spectroscopy of three powerful radio galaxies: Jet-cloud interactions seen in 3-D
• X-ray Emission Processes in Extragalactic Jets, Lobes and Hot Spots

Cited by in corpus (14)

• X-ray Emission from Extragalactic Jets
• Large Scale Extragalactic Jets in the Chandra era I: data reduction and analysis
• Hydrodynamic Models of Radio Galaxy Morphology: Winged and X-shaped Sources
• The Jet-Heated X-ray Filament in the Centaurus A Northern Middle Radio Lobe
• Deep Chandra and multicolor HST observations of the jets of 3C 371 and PKS 2201+044
• The jet-cloud interacting radio galaxy PKS B2152-699. I. Structures revealed in new deep radio and X-ray observations
• The Chandra View of Nearby X-shaped Radio Galaxies
• Deep Chandra X-ray Imaging of a Nearby Radio Galaxy 4C+29.30: X-ray/Radio Connection
• A newly discovered double-double candidate microquasar in NGC 300
• Offsets between X-ray and Radio Components in X-ray Jets: The AtlasX
• X-rays associated with the jet-cloud interacting radio galaxy 3C 277.3 (Coma A): implications for energy deposition
• Powerful Radio Sources in the Southern Sky. I. Optical Identifications
• Powerful Radio Sources in the Southern Sky. II. A SWIFT X-Ray Perspective
• Chandra X-ray Observatory study of the X-ray emission of PKS 0023-26 and comparison with recent ALMA results