English

Radio Core Size of Low-luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei under the MAD-jet model

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2026-07-24 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

After decades of efforts, there are now fruitful high-resolution radio observations of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs), and the observed frequency has extended from \sim10 GHz up to \sim200 GHz. In this work, based on a model that combines a magnetically arrested disk (MAD) and a Blandford-Znajek-like jet, we carried out detailed analysis on size and location of the radio core of LLAGNs. The radio core size of nearby LLAGN M104 is re-visited based on this new model. We successfully reproduce a sizeν1size\propto\nu^{-1} scaling between 1 GHz and tens of GHz, if more than 50%50\% of electrons in jet follow a power-law (PL) distribution. We further confirm that, at high radio frequencies emission from MAD exceeds that from jet, and a flatter size-frequency slope is observed. The impact of PL electrons in MAD is also investigated. For those Lbol/LEdd(38)×106L_{\rm bol}/L_{\rm Edd} \gtrsim (3-8)\times 10^{-6} LLAGNs and black hole binaries in their hard state, PL electrons are expected to be highly suppressed due to strong radiative cooling (so-called `synchrotron boiler' effect).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.21966,
  title  = {Radio Core Size of Low-luminosity Active Galactic Nuclei under the MAD-jet model},
  author = {Yue Xu and Fu-Guo Xie},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.21966},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. To appear in ApJ