Stellar-mass black holes on the millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion

Elford, Jacob S., Ruffa, Ilaria, Davis, Timothy A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4932-9379, Bureau, Martin, Fender, Rob, Gensior, Jindra, Williams, Thomas and Zhang, Hengyue 2026. Stellar-mass black holes on the millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 546 (2) , stag037. 10.1093/mnras/stag037

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Abstract

Recent work revealed the existence of a galaxy ‘millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion’, a tight correlation between nuclear 1 mm luminosity, intrinsic 2 – 10 keV X-ray luminosity and supermassive black hole mass, originally discovered for nearby low- and high-luminosity active galactic nuclei. Here we use mm and X-ray data of 5 X-ray binaries (XRBs) to demonstrate that these stellar-mass black holes also lie on the mm fundamental plane, as they do at radio wavelengths. One source for which we have multi-epoch observations shows evidence of deviations from the plane after a state change, suggesting that the plane only applies to XRBs in the hard state, as is true again at radio wavelengths. We show that both advection-dominated accretion flows and compact jet models predict the existence of the plane across the entire range of black hole masses, although these models vary in their ability to accurately predict the XRB black hole masses.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2026-01-09
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0035-8711
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	22 January 2026
Date of Acceptance:	5 January 2026
Last Modified:	27 Feb 2026 16:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/184095

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