Compact radio cores: from the first black holes to the last

Abstract

One of the clearest signs of black hole activity is the presence of a compact radio core in the nuclei of galaxies. While in the past the focus had been on the few bright and relativistically beamed sources, new surveys now show that essentially all black holes produce compact radio emission that can be used effectively for large radio surveys. Radio has the advantage of not being affected as much by obscuration. With the square kilometer array (SKA) these cores can be used to study the evolution of black holes throughout the universe and even to detect the very first generation of supermassive black holes. We start by introducing some of the basic properties of compact radio cores and how they scale with accretion power. The relative contribution of jets and radio cores to the Spectral Energy Distribution is strongest in sub-Eddington black holes but also present in the most luminous objects. Radio and X-rays are correlated as a function of black hole mass such that the most massive black holes are most suited for radio detections. We present a radio core luminosity function for the present universe down to the least luminous AGN. The SKA will essentially detect all dormant black holes in the local universe, such as that in our Milky Way, out to several tens of Megaparsecs. It will also be able to see black holes in the making at redshifts z > 10 for black hole masses larger than 10 7 M ⊙. Finally, we suggest that the first generation of black holes may have jets that are frustrated in their dense environment and thus appear as gigahertz-peaked-spectrum sources. Since their intrinsic size and peak frequency are related and angular size and frequency scale differently with redshift, there is a unique region in parameter space that should be occupied by emerging black holes in the epoch of reionization. This can be well probed by radio-only methods with the SKA.