Speaker
Description
Recently, our group has discovered new possibilities for studying AGN in polarized light, which has been a "reboot" for some branches of optical research. First, it was shown that all-night monitoring of BL Lac type objects with high accuracy and temporal resolution in polarized light allows us to estimate the size of an optical jet, and the intraday variability is consistent with a simple geometric model of the jet. Second, the technique of AGN reverberation mapping in polarized light was reinterpreted and it was shown that in the case of Sy 1 galaxies with equatorial scattering, the delay of the polarized signal in a broad emission line allows us to estimate the size of the scattering region, which is closely related to the radius of dust sublimation. These approaches have already been successfully applied to several well-known AGNs and have produced quantitative results presented in the report. At the same time, these methods are suitable not only for large instruments, as in the case of AGN spectropolarimetry, but also for small telescopes. Such an example is the 1-m telescope of the SAO RAS, for which our team developed and launched a new polarimeter in January 2020. This device makes it possible to conduct polarimetric observations in narrow and broad bands and allows us to achieve accuracy of up to 0.1% due to the use of a double Wollaston prism.