The Black Hole Fundamental Plane: Revisited with a Larger Sample of Radio and X‐Ray–Emitting Broad‐Line AGNs

Abstract

We use a recently released SDSS catalog of X-ray-emitting AGNs in conjunction with the FIRST radio survey to investigate the black hole (BH) fundamental plane relationship between the 1.4 GHz radio luminosity ( -->Lr), 0.1-2.4 keV X-ray luminosity ( -->LX), and black hole mass ( -->M), namely, -->log Lr = ξRXlog LX + ξRMlog M + constant . For this purpose, we compile a large sample of 725 broad-line AGNs, which consists of 498 radio-loud sources and 227 radio-quiet sources. We confirm that radio-loud objects have a steeper slope ( -->ξRX) with respect to radio-quiet objects and that the dependence of the BH fundamental plane on the BH mass ( -->ξRM) is weak. We also find tight correlation with a similar slope between the soft X-ray luminosity and broad emission-line luminosity for both radio-loud and radio-quiet AGNs, which implies that their soft X-ray emission is unbeamed and probably related to the accretion process. With the current larger sample, we find that there is no clear evidence of evolution for radio-quiet AGNs, while for radio-loud ones there is a weak trend in which -->ξRM decreases as the redshift increases. This may be understood in part as due to the observed evolution of the radio spectral index as a function of redshift. Finally, we discuss the relativistic beaming effect and other uncertainties related to the BH fundamental plane. We conclude that, although it does introduce scatter into the fundamental plane relation, Doppler boosting alone is not enough to explain the observed steeper value of -->ξRX in the radio-loud subsample with respect to the radio-quiet ones.