Simulations of nonthermal electron transport in multidimensional flows: synthetic observations of radio galaxies

Abstract

We have applied an effective numerical scheme for cosmic-ray transport to 3D MHD simulations of jet flow in radio galaxies (see the companion paper by Jones et al. herein). The marriage of relativistic particle and 3D magnetic field information allows us to construct a rich set of 'synthetic observations' of our simulated objects. The information is sufficient to calculate the 'true' synchrotron emissivity at a given frequency using explicit information about the relativistic electrons. This enables us to produce synchrotron surface-brightness maps, including polarization. Inverse-Compton X-ray surface-brightness maps may also be produced. First results intended to explore the connection between jet dynamics and electron transport in radio lobes are discussed. We infer lobe magnetic field values by comparison of synthetically observed X-ray and synchrotron fluxes, and find these 'inverse-Compton' fields to be quite consistent with the actual RMS field averaged over the lobe. The simplest minimum energy calculation from the synthetic observations also seems to agree with the actual simulated source properties. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved