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XMM-Newton observations of low-power radio galaxies
Credit: J.H. Croston (University of Hertfordshire, UK) and ESA


No Static at All

If you wander around the FM dial, you might find the most interesting stuff from low-power radio stations. Low power stations offer insights both mundane and bizarre, but almost always reflect their localities in important ways. This principle might not be Universal, however. A new study of "low power" radio galaxies (so-called Fanaroff-Riley type I galaxies, FR-I) compared their radio emission with their X-ray emission to look for correlations. The image above shows nine such galaxies as observed in X-rays with XMM-Newton (in color) with radio contours (from various radio telescopes) superimposed. These galaxies cover a range in X-ray luminosity of more than a factor of 100, with little correlation between the X-ray and radio properties. This study suggests that the evolution of the radio source (which is associated with a supermassive black hole at the center of these galaxies) cannot be determined entirely by the global properties of the hot, X-ray emitting gas associated with the FR-I galaxy.
Published: September 15, 2008


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Page Author: Dr. Michael F. Corcoran
Last modified Monday, 26-Feb-2024 17:10:39 EST