Understanding Scintillation of Intraday Variables

Intraday Variability of compact extragalactic radio sources can be interpreted as quenched scintillation due to turbulent density fluctuations of the nearby ionized interstellar medium. We demonstrate that the statistical analysis of IDV time series contains both information about sub-structure of the source on the scale of several 10 μas and about the turbulent state of the ISM. The source structure and ISM properties cannot be disentangled using IDV observations alone. A comparison with the known morphology of the ‘local bubble’ and the turbulent ISM from pulsar observations constrains possible source models. We further argue that earth orbit synthesis fails for non-stationary relativistic sources and no reliable 2D-Fourier reconstruction is possible.