Study of relativistic beaming and asymmetries in AGN

A study of relativistic beaming, superluminal motion and environmental/intrinsic effects on asymmetries observed in extragalactic radio sources. Investigation of the properties of features seen within superluminal sources, often referred to as jet components, indicates a fairly strong correlation between component sizes and radial distances. Assumption of free adiabatic expanding plasma enabled us to constrain in general the Lorentz factor for superluminal sources. Our estimated Lorentz factor indicates that BL Lac objects have the lowest range of Lorentz factor. Similarly, we obtained a kinematic model for asymmetries in radio sources, which enabled us to estimate the projected hotspot advance speed of high-luminosity radio sources using the arm-length ratio and apparent flux ratio. Also our kinematic asymmetric model suggests that larger (possibly older) sources are less asymmetric, which may be interpreted to be indicative of other factors, other than beaming, as being responsible for the observed asymmetries in radio source samples.