A fundamental plane of black hole accretion at millimetre wavelengths

Ruffa, Ilaria, Davis, Timothy A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4932-9379, Elford, Jacob S., Bureau, Martin, Cappellari, Michele, Gensior, Jindra, Haggard, Daryl, Iguchi, Satoru, Lelli, Federico, Liang, Fu-Heng, Liu, Lijie, Sarzi, Marc, Williams, Thomas G and Zhang, Hengyue 2024. A fundamental plane of black hole accretion at millimetre wavelengths. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters 528 (1) , L76-L82. 10.1093/mnrasl/slad167

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Abstract

We report the discovery of the ‘mm fundamental plane of black hole accretion’, which is a tight correlation between the nuclear 1 mm luminosity (Lν, mm), the intrinsic 2–10 keV X-ray luminosity (LX, 2–10) and the supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass (MBH) with an intrinsic scatter (σint) of 0.40 dex. The plane is found for a sample of 48 nearby galaxies, most of which are low-luminosity active galactic nuclei. Combining these sources with a sample of high-luminosity (quasar-like) nearby AGN, we show that the plane still holds. We also find that MBH correlates with Lν, mm at a highly significant level, although such correlation is less tight than the mm fundamental plane (σint = 0.51 dex). Crucially, we show that spectral energy distribution (SED) models for both advection-dominated accretion flows (ADAFs) and compact jets can explain the existence of these relations, which are not reproduced by the standard torus-thin accretion disc models usually associated to quasar-like AGN. The ADAF models reproduces the observed relations somewhat better than those for compact jets, although neither provides a perfect fit. Our findings thus suggest that radiatively inefficient accretion processes such as those in ADAFs or compact (and thus possibly young) jets may play a key role in both low- and high-luminosity AGN. This mm fundamental plane also offers a new, rapid method to (indirectly) estimate SMBH masses.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Publisher:	Wiley
ISSN:	1745-3925
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 September 2025
Date of Acceptance:	1 November 2023
Last Modified:	03 Sep 2025 11:35
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180864

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