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C.M. Swift, P.A. Hughes (U. Michigan), A. Rosen, P.E. Hardee (U. Alabama), G.C. Duncan (Bowling Green S.U.)
Recent studies of the stability and structure of relativistic and non-relativistic jets (Hardee et al., 1998, Ap. J., 500, 599; Rosen et al., Ap. J., in press) have shown their internal structures to be understandable in terms of the growth and/or damping of the normal modes of the jet, and contrasted the morphology of the two cases. Observation of such internal structures would provide a powerful diagnostic tool for probing the physical conditions of the flow. However, it is not clear how distinct such structures will be when their emissivity is integrated along a line of sight, allowing for time delay effects.
Motivated by this, we extend the work of Mioduszewski et al. (1997, Ap. J., 476, 649) and present a series of total flux maps for a subset of these recently analyzed hydrodynamic simulations. They were generated with a 2-D, axially symmetric code using adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) to maximize computer resources. The maps are computed using a recently constructed radiation transfer code in which the AMR structure of the hydrodynamic simulations is employed without recourse to interpolation onto a fine grid. This code was developed to facilitate such calculations with fully 3-D data sets for which simple interpolation onto a uniform grid is not feasible.
The radiation transfer assumes a permeating magnetic field in equipartition with the fast particle distribution, in which energy density scales with pressure, so that with the appropriate scaling we can explore the role of opacity, as well as external factors such as viewing angle. The simulations span a substantial range of adiabatic index (\Gamma), Lorentz factor (\gamma) and Mach number (M), and of viewing angles. The role of time delay effects in `smearing' observable structures is highlighted by displaying both the single epoch and time-delayed results.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: cmswift@astro.lsa.umich.edu