Relativistic Jets from AGN Viewed at Highest Angular Resolution

Abstract

Accreting supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN) produce powerful relativistic jets that shine from radio to GeV/TeV γ-rays. Over the past decade, AGN jets have extensively been studied in various energy bands and our knowledge about the broadband emission and rapid flares are now significantly updated. Meanwhile, the progress of magnetohydrodynamic simulations with a rotating black hole have greatly improved our theoretical understanding of powerful jet production. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to observationally resolve such flaring sites or jet formation regions since the relevant spatial scales are tiny. Observations with very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) are currently the only way to directly access such compact scales. Here we overview some recent progress of VLBI studies of AGN jets. As represented by the successful black hole shadow imaging with the Event Horizon Telescope, the recent rapid expansion of VLBI capability is remarkable. The last decade has also seen a variety of advances thanks to the advent of RadioAstron, GMVA, new VLBI facilities in East Asia as well as to the continued upgrade of VLBA. These instruments have resolved the innermost regions of relativistic jets for a number of objects covering a variety of jetted AGN classes (radio galaxies, blazars, and narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies), and the accumulated results start to establish some concrete (and likely universal) picture on the collimation, acceleration, recollimation shocks, magnetic field topology, and the connection to high-energy flares in the innermost part of AGN jets.