A fundamental plane of black hole activity: pushing forward the unification scheme
Abstract
We examine the disc--jet connection in stellar mass and supermassive black holes by investigating the properties of their compact emission in the hard X-ray and radio bands. We compile a sample of ~100 active galactic nuclei with measured mass, 5 GHz core emission, and 2-10 keV luminosity, together with 8 galactic black holes with a total of about 50 simultaneous observations in the radio and X-ray bands. Using this sample, we study the correlations between the radio (L_R) and the X-ray (L_X) luminosity and the black hole mass (M). We find that the radio luminosity is correlated with both M and L_X, at a highly significant level. We show how this result can be used to extend the standard unification by orientation scheme to encompass unification by mass and accretion rate.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0410481,
title = {A fundamental plane of black hole activity: pushing forward the unification scheme},
author = {Andrea Merloni and Sebastian Heinz and Tiziana Di Matteo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0410481},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
10 pages, 4 figures. To appear in the proceedings of "From X-ray Binaries to Quasars: Black Hole Accretion on All Mass Scales" (Amsterdam, July 2004). Eds T.Maccarone, R.Fender, L.Ho