PKS 1718-649: a broad-band study of a young radio jet

Physical conditions required to launch and sustain a jet and the jet's impact on black hole surroundings are believed to be strongly linked, and lie at the core of the AGN feedback idea. The physics of the initial stages of a radio jet expansion is still poorly understood. Nevertheless, highly relativistic plasma contained within young radio lobes and shocks accompanying a powerful jet expansion are expected to generate high energy radiation. However, this initial phase is short-lived and observing young radio sources at high energies has been challenging, with only a few sources detected before the Chandra and XMM-Newton era. We compiled a sample of Compact Symmetric Objects (CSO) that have kinematic age determination to study their high energy properties. Here we discuss one of the sources from our sample, PKS 1718-649 (z=0.014), hosting the most compact (2 pc) and youngest (100 years) extragalactic radio jet known to date. We observed PKS 1718-649 for the first time in X-rays and found that it is a low luminosity X-ray source, L(2-10 keV) ~ 6 x 10⁴¹ erg s^-1, and its X-ray spectrum is consistent with a mildly (intrinsically) absorbed power law (Gamma ~ 1.75, N_H ~ 10²¹ cm^-2). In addition, using the Fermi/LAT archive we established that this source is the first robustly confirmed gamma-ray CSO emitter. Merging the archival radio-to-optical data and our high energy results, we constructed a high quality broad-band spectral energy distribution of this source. We tested a theoretical scenario in which the high energy emission of the source arises due to the Inverse Compton upscattering of the low energy photons off the non-thermal electrons in the expanding radio lobes. We discuss the impact of the expanding lobes on the environment, and constraints imposed by the data on the electron distribution within the lobes.