Change of Intrinsic Brightness Temperatures of Compact Radio Jets

We present results of our investigation of intrinsic brightness temperatures of compact radio jets at radio frequencies. The intrinsic brightness temperatures of about 100 compact radio jets at 2, 5, 8, 15, and 86 GHz are estimated based on large VLBI surveys conducted in 2001-2003 (or in 1996 for the 5 GHz sample). The multi-freqeuncy intrinsic brightness temperatures of the sample of the jets are determined with a statistical method relating the observed brightness temperatures with the maximal apparent jet speed, assuming one representative intrinsic brightness temperature for the sample at each observing frequency. With investigating the observed brightness temperatures at 15 GHz in multiple epochs, we found that the determination of the intrinsc brightness temperature for our sample is affected by variability of individual jets in flux density at the time scales of a few years. This implies an importance of contemporaneity of the multi-frequency VLBI observations for the statistical method. Since our analysis is based on the VLBI observations conducted in 2001-2003, the results are less affected by the flux density variability. We found that the intrinsic brightness temperature $T_0$ increases as $T_0{\propto}{\nu}^{\epsilon}$ with ${\epsilon}{\approx}0.7$ below a critical frequency ${\nu}_c{\approx}10GHz$ where energy losses begin to dominate the emission, and above the critical frequency, $T_0$ decreases with ${\epsilon}{\approx}-1.2$ supporting for the decelerating jet model.