Detection of an X-ray jet in 3C 371 with Chandra

We report the detection at X-rays of the radio/optical jet of 3C 371 from a short (10 ks) Chandra exposure in 2000 March. We also present a new MERLIN observation at 1.4 GHz together with a reanalysis of the archival Hubble S pace Telescope Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 F555W image. Despite the limit ed signal-to-noise ratio of the Chandra data, the X-ray morphology is clear ly different from that of the radio/optical emission, with the brightest X- ray knot at 1."7 from the nucleus and little X-ray emission from the bright est radio/optical knot at 3."1. We construct the spectral energy distributi ons for the two emission regions at 1."7 and 3."1. Both show that the X-ray flux is below the extrapolation from the radio-to-optical continuum, sugge sting a moderately beamed synchrotron from an electron population with a de creasing high-energy cutoff as a plausible emission mechanism.