X-ray Emission from the 3C 273 Jet

Abstract

We present results from four recent Chandra monitoring observations of the jet in 3C 273 using the ACIS detector, obtained between November 2003 and July 2004. We find that the X-ray emission comes in two components: unresolved knots that are smaller than the corresponding optically emitting knots and a broad channel that is about the same width as the optical interknot region. We compute the jet speed under the assumption that the X-ray emission is due to inverse Compton scattering of the cosmic microwave background, finding that the dimming of the jet X-ray emission to the jet termination relative to the radio emission may be due to bulk deceleration.