On the nature of emission from relativistic jets

Several longstanding questions in astrophysics center on the make up of relativistic astrophysical jets seen in microquasars, blazars, gamma-ray bursts, and super-Eddington tidal disruption events. What carries the energy in these jets? Is the majority of the energy carried by Poynting flux or by the baryonic matter? How is this energy converted into the non-thermal gamma-rays and X-rays seen in these systems? While there are many different theoretical models for launching a relativistic jet and producing the non-thermal emission observed in these astrophysical systems, often times the observational data are not good enough to convincingly discriminate between models. This thesis is comprised of several different projects that address these questions for several different astrophysical systems. First I discuss some general considerations of the synchrotron radiation from electrons accelerated by magnetic reconnection in a Poynting dominated jet. I show that the super-Eddington tidal disruption events (TDE) represent an unique opportunity to test different emission mechanisms in relativistic jets. I find that a magnetic dominated jet model can most easily explain the broadband observations in the observed super-Eddington TDE Sw J1644+57. In gamma-ray bursts, that hadronic emission models cannot explain the high energy ( >100 MeV) gamma-rays observed by the Fermi Large Area Telescope. I also include a chapter that suggests using the radio monitoring of the diffuse cloud in the galactic center object G2's to distinguish between different models of G2. Early observations of G2 after periapse passage suggests this prediction was correct.