Zooming in on the peculiar radio-loud narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy, J1100+4421

Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1) are interesting subsamples of active galactic nuclei, which are typically thought to contain a relatively smaller supermassive black holes (10^6-10^8 solar masses) and show quite high accretion rate. Only 7% of them are detected in radio. The radio structure of the objects in the extremely radio-loud NLS1 subsample indicates the presence of relativistically beamed jets. Some radio-loud NLS1s were detected even at high energies with the Fermi Large Array Telescope. Therefore these sources are often suggested to be the low-luminosity and younger counterparts of blazars. SDSS J110006.07+442144.3 was identified as an NLS1 at z=0.84 after its dramatic optical brightening discovered by Tanaka et al. (2014) Our dual-frequency (1.6 and 5 GHz) European VLBI Network observations taken one year after this event show a compact structre with brightness temperature of 6 x 10^9 K and a flat spectral index indicating the presence of a compact synchrotron self-absorbed core. Compared with low resolution VLA-FIRST data, the large-scale structure seen there is resolved out in the EVN observation. However the recovered flux density in our L-band EVN observation is significantly higher than the FIRST flux density, which is indicative of brightening in the radio regime. All these results fit into the picture where radio-loud NLS1s are described as faint blazars.