Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• FALCKE, H
• KÖRDING, E
• MARKOFF, S

Titel

A scheme to unify low-power accreting black holes: Jet-dominated accretion flows and the radio/X-ray correlation

Ist Teil von

• Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin), 2004-02, Vol.414 (3), p.895-903

Ort / Verlag

Les Ulis: EDP Sciences

Erscheinungsjahr

2004

Quelle

EZB Electronic Journals Library

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• We explore the evolution in power of black holes of all masses, and their associated jets, within the scheme of an accretion rate-dependent state transition. Below a critical value of the accretion rate all systems are assumed to undergo a transition to a state where the dominant accretion mode is optically thin and radiatively inefficient. In these significantly sub-Eddington systems, the spectral energy distribution is predicted to be dominated by non-thermal emission from a relativistic jet whereas near-Eddington black holes will be dominated instead by emission from the accretion disk. Reasonable candidates for such a sub-Eddington state include X-ray binaries in the hard and quiescent states, the Galactic Center (Sgr A*), LINERs, FR I radio galaxies, and a large fraction of BL Lac objects. Standard jet physics predicts non-linear scaling between the optically thick (radio) and optically thin (optical or X-ray) emission of these systems, which has been confirmed recently in X-ray binaries. We show that this scaling relation is also a function of black hole mass and only slightly of the relativistic Doppler factor. Taking the scaling into account we show that indeed hard and quiescent state X-ray binaries, LINERs, FR I radio galaxies, and BL Lacs can be unified and fall on a common radio/X-ray correlation. This suggests that jet domination is an important stage in the luminosity evolution of accreting black hole systems.