English

The mm-wave compact component of AGN

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-05-23 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

mm-wave emission from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) may hold the key to understanding the physical origin of their radio cores. The correlation between radio/mm and X-ray luminosity may suggest a similar physical origin of the two sources. Since synchrotron self absorption decreases with frequency, mm-waves probe smaller length scales than cm-waves. We report on 100 GHz (3 mm) observations with CARMA of 26 AGNs selected from the hard X-ray Swift/BAT survey. 20/26 targets were detected at 100 GHz down to the 1 mJy (3 σ\sigma) sensitivity, which corresponds to optically thick synchrotron source sizes of 104^{-4} - 103^{-3} pc). Most sources show a 100 GHz flux excess with respect to the spectral slope extrapolated from low frequencies. This mm spectral component likely originates from smaller scales than the few-GHz emission. The measured mm sources lie roughly around the Lmm_{mm} (100 GHz) \sim 101^{-1} LX_{X} (2-10 keV) relation, similar to a few previously published X-ray selected sources, and hinting perhaps at a common coronal origin.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.06877,
  title  = {The mm-wave compact component of AGN},
  author = {Ehud Behar and Stuart Vogel and Ranieri D. Baldi and Krista L. Smith and Richard F. Mushotzky},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.06877},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

submitted to MNRAS, revised by the referee, comments welcome (9 pages, 4 figures)