The discovery of a microarcsecond quasar: J1819+3845

Abstract

We report on the discovery of a source which exhibits over 300% amplitude changes in radio flux density on the period of hours. This source, J1819+3845, is the most extremely variable extragalactic source known in the radio sky. We believe these properties are due to interstellar scintillation, and show that the source must emit at least 55% of its flux density within a radius of <16 microarcseconds at 5GHz. The apparent brightness temperature is > 5.10^{12} K, and the source may be explained by a relativistically moving source with a Doppler factor ~15. The scattering occurs predominantly in material only a few tens of parsecs from the earth, which explains its unusually rapid variability. If the source PKS 0405-385 (Kedziora-Chudczer et al 1997) is similarly affected by local scattering material, Doppler factors of ~1000 are not required to explain this source. The discovery of a second source whose properties are well modeled by interstellar scintillation strengthens the argument for this as the cause for much of the variations seen in intra-day variables (IDV).