Scientific Seminars

Where is the radio counterpart of gamma-ray flaring region?

Hiroshi Nagai
NAOJ Chile Observatory

2013-10-29    14:00    Brera - Cupola Fiore

The radio source 3C~84 associated with the radio/giant elliptical galaxy NGC~1275 is one of the best targets to probe the radio counterpart of the gamma-ray emitting region. Although this source shows clear time variability in gamma-ray bands, no clear correlation in radio light curve was found on the timescale of gamma-ray variability. The location of the gamma-ray flaring region has been an open question. In this talk, I firstly review our previous findings from radio observations (Nagai et al. 2010, Nagai et al. 2012). Next I present our new results based on the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) data at 43GHz. We discover the limb-brightened structure in the ``restarted" jet associated with the 2005 radio outburst. In 1990s, the jet structure was rather ridge-brightening than limb-brightening, despite the observations were done with similar angular resolution. This indicates that the radio jet morphology in terms of the transverse structure has been indeed changed recently. This change in the morphology shows an interesting agreement with the time variation of the gamma-ray flux density, i.e., the gamma-ray flux density in 1990s was more than 7 times lower than the current one. We argue the possibility that the transition from ridge-brightening to limb-brightening is related to the gamma-ray time variability.