Introduction
Some of the most energetic objects in the Universe, AGN can release up to 10
61 ergs of energy into their surroundings
(Wise et. al., 2007) and can have such enormous luminosities that they can be observed at incredible red shifts.
AGN come in many different flavors, but they are all likely similar objects. An AGN is the core of a galaxy that is
so luminous that it outshines all of the rest of the stars in the galaxy. This core, or central engine, is powered by
a supermassive black hole that is accreting nearby dust and gas. This material forms an accretion disk that becomes
super-heated as it falls into the black hole. Extremely high velocity, supersonic jets will develop along the axis
of the black hole ejecting low density plasma far out into the environment around the galaxy (Figure 3 & 4). AGN are
located within galaxy clusters, which are immersed in fully ionized, collisionless plasma (Jones, 2007) called the
intracluster medium or ICM. The plasma criteria that λ
D << L and N
D >> 1 are satisfied when considering scales, L, on
the order of a few percent of the length of the jet. Given typical values of kT
e,ICM ~ 10keV and ne ~ 10
-3 cm
-3
(Jones, 2007), λ
D ~ 2.4x10
6 cm and N
D ~ 5.4x10
16. Jets from AGN are on the order of hundreds of
kiloparsecs (~10
23 cm). AGN jets, although higher in temperature and lower in density than the ICM, also satisfy the plasma conditions.
Simulations
My research with
Tom Jones is to produce synthetic observations from simulations
of the jets from AGN. We use a TVD (total variation diminishing) 3 dimension MHD code by Dongsu Ryu and Tome Jones
the solves the MHD equations and utilizes a CT (constrained transport) algorithm to maintain ∇⋅B. The simulations,
set up a former graudate student Sean O'Neill, were run
