Two Candidate High-redshift X-Ray Jets without Coincident Radio Jets

Abstract

Abstract We report the detection of extended X-ray emission from two high-redshift radio quasars. These quasars, J1405+0415 at z = 3.208 and J1610+1811 at z = 3.118, were observed in a Chandra snapshot survey selected from a complete sample of the radio-brightest quasars in the overlap area of the VLA-FIRST radio survey and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The extended X-ray emission is located along the line connecting the core to a radio knot or hotspot, favoring the interpretation of X-ray jets. The inferred rest-frame jet X-ray luminosities from 2 to 30 keV would be of order 1045 erg s−1 if emitted isotropically and without relativistic beaming. In the scenario of inverse Compton scattering of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), X-ray jets without a coincident radio counterpart may be common, and should be readily detectable to redshifts even beyond 3.2 due to the (1+z)4 increase of the CMB energy density compensating for the (1+z)−4 cosmological diminution of surface brightness. If these can be X-ray confirmed, they would be the second and third examples of quasar X-ray jets without detection of underlying continuous radio jets.