Probing the Innermost Regions of AGN Jets and Their Magnetic Fields with RadioAstron. III. Blazar S5 0716+71 at Microarcsecond Resolution

We present RadioAstron Space VLBI imaging observations of the BL Lac object S5 0716+71 made on 2015 January 3-4 at a frequency of 22 GHz (wavelength λ = 1.3 cm). The observations were made in the framework of the AGN Polarization Key Science Program. The source was detected on projected space-ground baselines up to 70,833 km (5.6 Earth diameters) for both parallel-hand and cross-hand interferometric visibilities. We have used these detections to obtain a full-polarimetric image of the blazar at an unprecedented angular resolution of 24 μas, the highest for this source to date. This enabled us to estimate the size of the radio core to be <12 × 5 μas and to reveal a complex structure and a significant curvature of the blazar jet in the inner 100 μas, which is an indication that the jet viewing angle lies inside the opening angle of the jet conical outflow. Fairly highly (15%) linearly polarized emission is detected in a jet region 19 μas in size, located 58 μas downstream from the core. The highest brightness temperature in the source frame is estimated to be >2.2 × 1013 K for the blazar core. This implies that the inverse-Compton limit must be violated in the rest frame of the source, even for the largest Doppler factor δ ∼ 25 reported for 0716+714. © 2020. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.