MOJAVE. XVII. Jet Kinematics and Parent Population Properties of Relativistically Beamed Radio-Loud Blazars

Understand

We present results from a parsec-scale jet kinematics study of 409 bright radio-loud AGNs based on 15 GHz VLBA data obtained between 1994 August 31 and 2016 December 26 as part of the 2cm VLBA survey and MOJAVE programs.

• We tracked 1744 individual bright features in 382 jets over at least five epochs.
• A majority (59%) of the best-sampled jet features showed evidence of accelerated motion at the >3sigma level.
• Although most features within a jet typically have speeds within ~40% of a characteristic median value, we identified 55 features in 42 jets that had unusually slow pattern speeds, nearly all of which lie within 4 pc (100 pc de-projected) of the core feature.