Landing page for project EH042

Blazars are one of the most extreme objects in the Universe, shining brightly in all wavelengths from radio to very-high-energy gamma rays, and launching relativistic jets where particles travel near the speed of light. We will conduct spatially-resolved near-infrared observations of two blazars using the ESO VLTI-GRAVITY instrument that utilizes the four 8-m VLT telescopes in Chile. This would be the first time that milliarcsecond-scale jets are resolved at wavelengths shorter than 1mm. This would have major implications for blazar modeling that typically assume only a single emission region at short wavelengths. Here we request quasi-simultaneous EVN observations of these two blazars in order to map them at a comparable angular resolution and to look for sites of particle re-acceleration in the jets, which could also be sites of near-infrared emission. We request EVN observations at 5 and 8 GHz to achieve the best sensitivity and appropriate angular resolution.

This data is part of the archive of VLBI data maintained by JIVE on behalf of the EVN, a network of radio telescopes located primarily in Europe and Asia, with additional antennas in South Africa. The EVN archive itself has the DOI https://doi.org/10.17616/R3Z197