Speaker
Description
Our present understanding of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and their jets is biased towards observations of bright, one-sided and strongly Doppler boosted AGN jets, such as in M 87. However, for an all-inclusive physical description we have to include all flavors of AGN, at all possible jet powers and at all scales. Combining AGN studies across the radio spectrum, from LOFAR wavelengths to mm-VLBI, is crucial to unraveling the underlying physics from black hole feeding to jet formation, acceleration, and collimation, towards the interplay of jets with the host galaxy, leading to AGN feedback. This requires us to combine the small and large scales in AGN from mpc to Mpc. This is challenging with current instruments, but has good prospects with future advances represented by the SKA (-VLBI) and the ngVLA.
To work towards this goal I am focusing on nearby AGN with misaligned jets, including a subset of strongly misaligned, doubled-sided jets, allowing to study the symmetry in these systems. I will show examples on how VLBI can be used to uncover the processes of jet expansion and evolution, specifically for the cases of 3C 293, NGC 3894 and NGC 1052, combining observations from the HSA, EVN+eMERLIN and LOFAR. To overcome the problem of the low number statistics of VLBI studies of double-sided jets required for symmetry studies, I will present possible solutions using clustering algorithms on large radio astronomical datasets such as the LOFAR Two-metre Sky Survey.
