Low-mass Active Galactic Nuclei on the Fundamental Plane of Black Hole Activity

Abstract

Abstract It is widely known that in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and black hole X-ray binaries (BHXBs), there is a tight correlation among their radio luminosity (L R ), X-ray luminosity (L X), and BH mass ( ), the so-called “fundamental plane” (FP) of BH activity. Yet the supporting data are very limited in the regime between stellar mass (i.e., BHXBs) and 106.5 (namely, the lower bound of supermassive BHs in common AGNs). In this work, we developed a new method to measure the 1.4 GHz flux directly from the images of the VLA FIRST survey, and apply it to the type-1 low-mass AGNs in the Dong et al. sample. As a result, we obtained 19 new low-mass AGNs for FP research with both estimates ( ≈ 105.5–6.5 ), reliable X-ray measurements, and (candidate) radio detections, tripling the number of such candidate sources in the literature. Most (if not all) of the low-mass AGNs follow the standard radio/X-ray correlation and the universal FP relation fitted with the combined data set of BHXBs and supermassive AGNs by Gültekin et al.; the consistency in the radio/X-ray correlation slope among those accretion systems supports the picture that the accretion and ejection (jet) processes are quite similar in all accretion systems of different . In view of the FP relation, we speculate that the radio loudness (i.e., the luminosity ratio of the jet to the accretion disk) of AGNs depends not only on Eddington ratio, but probably also on .