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H.L. Marshall (MIT CSR), T. Cheung (Brandeis), C.R. Canizares (MIT CSR), T. Fang (CMU)
The blazar 3C 279 was observed with the Chandra High Energy Transmission Grating Spectrometer (HETGS) on 21-22 March 2002 for 106,500 s. The X-ray spectrum of the core is well described by a power law with photon index of 1.6. There is no evidence for a broad Fe-K line nor is a narrow component detected. The zeroth order image of the quasar provides excellent detections of three of the large scale radio knots: E, F, and G (using the de Pater and Perley 1983 nomenclature). These knots are distributed from 1.5'' to 4.6'' from the quasar core. An interior knot, D, is only 0.6'' from the core and is not sufficiently resolved from it in the Chandra HETGS image. We examine the radio and X-ray fluxes in light of the beaming model that is used to explain the superluminal motions of the core components on milliarcsecond scales (Piner et al. 2003). We assess the possibility that the X-ray emission results from inverse Compton upscattering of cosmic microwave background photons. In this model, the jet is highly relativistic at the projected distance of 29 kpc from the core. Assuming that the angle to the line of sight is similar to that observed in the core, the actual length would be 0.55 Mpc.
This work was supported in part by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) contract SVI-61010 for the Chandra X-Ray Center (CXC) and NASA contract NAS8-39073.
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 35 #3
© 2003. The American Astronomical Soceity.