Macy Bauers

Galaxies with very luminous super massive black holes at the center are known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). Sometimes, AGNs form jets. When those jets point directly at the observer, the emission is boosted and they are classified as a Blazar. Blazars are known to accelerate particles to very high energies along the axis pointing at the observer. There are two main theories regarding the particle acceleration within the jets of blazars: the first is that particles are accelerated in bulk and the observed spectrum is due to cooling, and the second is that the observed particle spectrum is due to stochastic acceleration processes. Different time scales of X-ray variability within the jet can give insight into the physical scales at which acceleration occurs, and thus inform on the structure of acceleration and potentially differentiate between these theories. Using data collected from the X-ray telescope (XRT) aboard the The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, I generated power spectrum densities (PSD, a relationship of power vs frequency) and determined particle spectrums for a selection of blazars. In this poster, I will present the comparison of the extracted PSD and particle spectrum indices for these blazars and what we can learn about particle acceleration in jets from such a relationship.