Regensburg 2007 – scientific programme

Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Downloads | Help

EP: Fachverband Extraterrestrische Physik

EP 10: Poster

EP 10.28: Poster

Wednesday, March 28, 2007, 18:00–20:00, H46

Relativistic pickup process of interstellar neutral gas — •Dirk Gerbig and Reinhard Schlickeiser — Theoretische Physik IV, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

The relativistic pickup process in Active Galactic Nuclei is investigated with respect to the influence of interstellar neutral atoms under the assumption of a jet plasma consisting of thermally distributed electrons and ions. A computation of the ionisation length of neutral hydrogen for charge exchange showed that only a small portion of the neutral atoms are ionised in the outflow region. Electron impact ionisation, however, turned out to be the dominating process for the generation of relativistic pickup ions. The latter could trigger two-stream instabilities and, thus, possibly explain the observed GeV-TeV emissions in those jets.