Relativistic and slowing down : the flow in the hotspots of powerful radio galaxies and quasars

Pairs of radio emitting jets with lengths up to several hundred kiloparsecs emanate from the central region (the ‘core’) of radio loud active galaxies. In the most powerful of them, these jets terminate in the ‘hotspots’, compact high brightness regions, where the jet flow collides with the intergalactic medium (IGM). Although it has long been established that in their inner (∼parsec) regions these jet flows are relativistic, it is still not clear if they remain so at their largest (hundreds of kiloparsec) scales. We argue that the X-ray, optical and radio data of the hotspots, despite their at-first-sight disparate properties, can be unified in a scheme involving a relativistic flow upstream of the hotspot that decelerates to the sub-relativistic speed of its inferred advance through the IGM and viewed at different angles to its direction of motion. This scheme, besides providing an account of the hotspot spectral properties with jet orientation, it also suggests that the large-scale jets remain relativistic all the way to the hotspots. Subject headings: galaxies: active — quasars: general — radiation mechanisms: nonthermal — X-rays: galaxies