Volume 344 - 14th European VLBI Network Symposium & Users Meeting (EVN2018) - Posters about AGN
Interstellar Scintillation Monitoring of the RadioAstron Blazars
J. Liu,* T.P. Krichbaum, H.E. Bignall, X. Liu, A. Kraus, Y. Kovalev, K. Sokolovsky, G. Cimò, A. Zensus
*corresponding author
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Pre-published on: 2019 May 03
Published on:
Abstract
The RadioAstron space radio telescope provides a unique opportunity to study the extreme brightness temperatures ($\mathrm{T_B}$) in AGNs with unprecedented long baselines of up to 28 Earth diameters. Since interstellar scintillation (ISS) may affect the visibilities observed with space VLBI (sVLBI), a complementary ground based flux density monitoring of the RadioAstron targets, which is performed near in time to the VLBI observation, could be beneficial. The combination/comparison with the sVLBI data can help to unravel the relative influence of source intrinsic and ISS induced effects, which in the end may alter the conclusions on the $\mathrm{T_B}$ measurements from sVLBI. Since 2013, a dedicated monitoring program has been ongoing to observe the ISS of RadioAstron AGN targets with a number of radio telescopes. Here we briefly introduce the program and present results from the statistical analysis of the Effelsberg monitoring data. We discuss the possible effects of ISS on $\mathrm{T_B}$ measurements for the RadioAstron target B0529+483 as a case study.
Open Access