Two Candidate High-Redshift X-ray Jets Without Coincident Radio Jets
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--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.
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