Dates
14 August 2026
12:00pm ET
Monitoring & Modeling Blazar Jets Across the Electromagnetic Spectrum
Speaker
Dr. Nicholas R. MacDonald, University of Mississippi
Abstract
The Ole Miss Blazar Group has recently been established at The University of Mississippi (UM). Our group is actively involved in both the theoretical interpretation and observation of relativistic black hole jets (objects known as blazars). The group is a part of UM’s Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics (UMCMA). In this talk, I will summarize three of the group’s student led projects: (i) GPU Enabled Simulations of Jet Propagation using the gPLUTO Code, (ii) Polarized Radiative Transfer Calculations of Jet Synchrotron Emission using the RADMC-3D Code, and (iii) Modeling Blazar Orphan Gammaray Flares using the BLAZE Code. The Ole Miss Blazar Group has also been awarded a National Science Foundation EPSCoR grant (Award #: 2429473) to establish a partnership between the UM and Boston University (BU) Blazar Groups. In particular, we are working to extend BU’s optical polarimetric monitoring of a sample of Gamma-ray bright blazars targeted by NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). Our group is now actively involved in blazar optical polarimetric observations, and has made multiple trips to the Perkins Telescope Observatory (PTO) in Flagstaff, Arizona. The linearly and circularly polarized synchrotron emission from blazar jets carry imprints of both the strength and orientation of the jet’s collimating magnetic field as well as the plasma content of the jet environment. Our relativistic jet simulations yield synchrotron polarization estimates that can be used to interpret both Very Long Baseline Interferometric (VLBI) jet observations and single dish light curves of jet variability across the electromagnetic spectrum. By attempting to bridge the gap between blazar theory and observation, we aim to advance our understanding of the intrinsic plasma nature of relativistic black hole jets in 3D.
