Optical polarimetry of 152 AGN

There is consensus that these discrepancies do indeed manifest astrometrically resolved sub-components of AGN rather than random measurement noise. Among other evidence, it has been reported that AGN with VLBI-to-Gaia displacements (VGD) pointing downstream their parsec-scale radio jets exhibit higher optical polarization compared to sources with the opposite (upstream) VGD orientation.We aim to verify the previously reported connection between optical polarization and VGD-jet angle using a larger dataset of polarimetric measurements and updated Gaia DR3 positions.

We also seek further evidence supporting the disc-jet dichotomy as an explanation of such a connection by using mm-wave polarization and multi-band optical polarization measurements. We performed optical polarimetric observations of 152 AGN using three telescopes. These data are complemented by other publicly available polarimetric measurements of AGN.