Abstract
Due to its outstanding surface brightness, the jet of M 87 is the earliest known and best investigated extragalactic radio jet. Thus, many contributions to our current picture of extragalactic radio sources originated from observations of M 87 (= Virgo A = 3C 274). We highlight some of these earlier results. Then we present a concise summary of the observed properties in all currently accessible wavelength regions between 1 GHz (radio) and 3 × 1017 Hz (X-rays). They show that the jet of M 87 is well collimated on all (projected) scales between 0.1 and 2000 pc. The radio images show filamentary structure on scales < 25 pc. The superposition of these filaments together with local enhancements of their surface brightness leads to the knotty appearence of the jet observed at medium resolution (1″, i.e. 80 pc). The magnetic field lines closely follow the filaments. Both from very high signal-to-noise observations with groundbased optical telescopes (1″ resolution) and recent HST results (0″.1 resolution) one concludes that the morphology and polarization is virtually identical over the entire frequency range between 109 and 1014 Hz at least on scales ≳ 10 pc.
Proper motions with a speed of 0.1 to 0.7 c are seen both in the parsec and the kiloparsec jet, although several small condensations may move with even larger velocities. We point out the most important implications for the physics of the jet in M 87 following from these observations.
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Biretta, J.A., Meisenheimer, K. (1993). The jet of M 87. In: Röser, HJ., Meisenheimer, K. (eds) Jets in Extragalactic Radio Sources. Lecture Notes in Physics, vol 421. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57164-7_93
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-57164-7_93
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