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Session 74 - Pulsars.
Oral session, Thursday, June 11
Recently, the sample of relativistic galactic jet sources has almost doubled. These sources are usually seen in X-ray binaries, where a ``normal'' star is accreting onto a black hole or neutron star. The new Galactic jet source, CI Cam, however, is a symbiotic star (i.e. a Be star with a companion). All these sources show a link between high energy emission in the X-ray and the occurrence of radio emission and the ejection of jets. SS433 was the first, and still in many ways the best known, example of a relativistic radio jet in our own Galaxy. As in the classical extragalactic jets, individual components trace out a helical path as they move away from a compact core with speeds of order the speed of light. We will present Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) images of SS433, observed on three consecutive days at 3 frequencies. This data gives daily coverage of the evolution of the jet, allowing an examination of the dynamics and the flux variations of the individual components. CI Cam flared to 2 Crab in the X-ray on 1 April 1998; subsequent radio observations showed that this bright flare was associated with the appearance of a radio source at the position of CI Cam. We will present VLBI images of CI Cam observed one and three days after its X-ray flare. An image from the first epoch indicates the presence of a jet.
Program listing for Thursday