Jg. Skibo et al., IS THE HIGH-ENERGY EMISSION FROM CENTAURUS A COMPTON-SCATTERED JET RADIATION, The Astrophysical journal, 426(1), 1994, pp. 120000023-120000026
We consider whether the hard X-ray and soft gamma-ray emission from Ce
ntaurus A is beamed radiation from the active nucleus that is Compton-
scattered into our line of sight. We derive the spectrum and degree of
polarization of scattered radiation when incident beamed radiation is
scattered from a cold (kT much less than m(e)c2) electron cloud movin
g with bulk relativistic motion along the jet axis, and calculate resu
lts for an unpolarized, highly beamed incident power-law photon source
. We fit the OSSE data from Centaurus A with this model and find that
if the scatterers are not moving relativistically, then the angle the
jet makes with respect to our line of sight is 61-degrees + 5-degrees.
We predict a high degree of polarization of the scattered radiation b
elow approximately 300 keV. Future measurements with X-ray and gamma-r
ay polarimeters could be used to constrain or rule out such a scenario
.