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arXiv · 2609.31836

Discovery of minute-scale polarization angle rotation in a supermassive black hole jet

Aristeidis Polychronakis·Ioannis Liodakis·Dmitry Blinov·Anastasia Glykopoulou·Sebastian Kiehlmann·Karan Pal·Georgios F. Paraschos·Lena Debbrecht·Swati Ravi·Herman L. Marshall
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Abstract

Relativistic jets from supermassive black holes oriented towards our line of sight called blazars have puzzled the astronomical community for decades. Their fast jets and preferential alignment creates a fog of relativistic effects that obscures their true properties. Optical polarimetry - tracing the uniformity, direction, and evolution of the magnetic field in the jets, has revealed a unique phenomenon to blazars; coherent changes of the magnetic field manifesting as rotations of the polarization angle ($Ψ$). The origin of those rotations has been debated for decades with several proposed models to explain them. We detected an extremely fast - minute time-scale - rotation in the polarization angle of $\sim136^\circ$ over the span of about 80 minutes, making it the fastest known rotation by almost an order of magnitude. Our optical polarization observations combined with radio very long baseline interferometry allow us to reject different models of particle acceleration and strongly point to relativistic effects and the interaction of standing and moving shock waves as the origin of the extreme polarization variations in jets.

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Aristeidis Polychronakis, Ioannis Liodakis, Dmitry Blinov, Anastasia Glykopoulou, Sebastian Kiehlmann, Karan Pal, Georgios F. Paraschos, Lena Debbrecht, Swati Ravi, Herman L. Marshall. 2026-09-25. Discovery of minute-scale polarization angle rotation in a supermassive black hole jet. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31836

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