Supermassive black holes transfer material and energy to their environments through radio lobes, driving the evolution and ecology of the universe. Underpinning these processes are fundamental questions about the prevalence and distribution of magnetised thermal plasma in these systems, which encodes the lobes’ history of interaction with the environment and the physical processes occurring within. Unfortunately however, our capacity to study these processes observationally has lagged far behind simulations and theory, which have driven our understanding of radio lobes in recent years.
The situation is typified by Centaurus A, which despite being our nearest and prototypical FR-I radio galaxy, is still poorly understood. For example, we still don't know why the radio emission from the lobes is filamentary, why the radio morphology of the northern and southern lobe complexes differ so markedly, how synchrotron-emitting and thermal plasma is distributed throughout the lobes, or how energy flows from the central AGN through the lobes to the external environment.
However, the observational status quo has recently been upended by the development of broadband receivers and back ends in radio telescopes. These enable broadband spectral index and Faraday rotation studies, which can extract rich information about the structure and dynamics of radio lobes, and the physical processes occurring therein. We propose to use the revolutionary capabilities of the UWL receiver on Parkes to observe Centaurus A over a broad 0.7--3.3 GHz band in full polarization. Coupled with modern analysis techniques, we will address the questions posed above.
