Interstellar scintillation as a probe of microarcsecond scale structure in quasars

Abstract

Observations over the last two decades have shown that a significant fraction of all flat-spectrum, extragalactic radio sources exhibit flux density variations on timescales of a day or less at frequencies of several GHz. It has been demonstrated that interstellar scintillation (ISS) is the principal cause of such rapid variability. Observations of ISS can be used to probe very compact, microarcsecond-scale structure in quasar inner jets, as well as properties of turbulence in the local Galactic ISM. A few sources show unusually rapid, intra-hour variations, evidently due to scattering in very nearby, localized turbulence. We present recent findings for the rapidly scintillating quasar PKS 1257−326. The large-scale MASIV VLA Survey showed that such sources are extremely rare, implying that for most scintillating sources, longer-term, dedicated monitoring programs are required to extract detailed information on source structures.