A Universal Scaling for the Energetics of Relativistic Jets from Black Hole Systems

Abstract

Black holes generate collimated, relativistic jets which have been observed in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), microquasars, and at the center of some galaxies (active galactic nuclei; AGN). How jet physics scales from stellar black holes in GRBs to the supermassive ones in AGNs is still unknown. Here we show that jets produced by AGNs and GRBs exhibit the same correlation between the kinetic power carried by accelerated particles and the γ-ray luminosity, with AGNs and GRBs lying at the low and high-luminosity ends, respectively, of the correlation. This result implies that the efficiency of energy dissipation in jets produced in black hole systems is similar over 10 orders of magnitude in jet power, establishing a physical analogy between AGN and GRBs.Relativistic jets are ubiquitous in the cosmos and have been observed in a diverse range of black hole systems spanning from stellar mass (∼ 10M ) to supermassive scales (∼ 10 5 − 10 10 M ), in particular in the bright flashes of gamma-rays known as GRBs (1, 2), the miniature versions of quasars lurking in our galaxy known as "microquasars" (3) and AGNs (4,5). Despite decades of observations at almost all wavelengths and considerable theoretical efforts, there are still many aspects of black hole jets which remain mysterious: the mechanism(s) responsible for their formation and the nature of their energetics as well as their high-energy radiation (6,7). Jets and outflows from supermassive black holes have important feedback effects on scales ranging from their host galaxies to groups and clusters of galaxies (8). Hence, a better understanding of the physics of jets is required in order to have a more complete picture of the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the universe and the coevolution of black holes and galaxies (9).One outstanding question is how the jet physics scale with mass from stellar to supermassive black holes. Interestingly, there is evidence that jets behave in similar ways in microquasars and radio-loud AGN (10-12). However, a clear connection between AGN and GRBs has not been established yet, although recent work provides encouraging results (13, 14).As a first step in understanding how the properties of jets vary across the mass scale, we focus on the energetics of jets produced in AGNs and GRBs. Therefore, we searched the literature for published and archival observations that allow us to estimate the jet radiative output and the kinetic power for a sample of black hole systems in which the jet is closely aligned with our line of sight and characterized by a broad range of masses. For this reason, our sample consists of blazars -AGNs with their jets oriented toward Earth (15) -and GRBs, the spectral energy distributions of which are completely dominated by the jet due to beaming effects.We used as a proxy of the jet bolometric luminosity the observed γ-ray luminosity L iso which is isotropically equivalent. In order to estimate the kinetic power P jet , we use extended radio luminosities for the blazars whereas for the GRBs we reli...

The power of relativistic jets is larger than the luminosity of their accretion disks

“…1): this implies that the jet stops at R diss (and no radio halo, no superluminal motion would be possible); ii) It is found that P jet ∼ 10P rad for blazars and for Gamma Ray Burst, using arguments completely different from ours 21 . We compare the total jet power and the radiative one for the blazars in our sample.…”

“…The power in radiation P rad is believed to be about 10% of the jet power P jet and, remarkably, this holds true both for Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and Gamma-Ray Bursts 21 . We confirm this result, if there is one proton per emitting lepton (see Methods and Extended data Figure 1).…”

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AND THEIR HOST SPHEROIDS. II. THE RED AND BLUE SEQUENCE IN THE MBH–M*,SPH DIAGRAM

“…We acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr). The BCES routine (Akritas & Bershady 1996) was run via the python module written by Rodrigo Nemmen (Nemmen et al 2012), which is available at https://github.com/ rsnemmen/BCES.…”

The extension of variability properties in gamma-ray bursts to blazars

“…The similar slopes of the GRB/blazar sample and the pure GRB sample strengthen that the correlations as found in GRBs can be extended to blazars. These results provide new similarities on the jet physics in GRBs and blazars, where several other similar properties have been found in last several years(e.g., Wang & Wei 2011;Wu et al 2011;Nemmen et al 2012). It should be noted that Sonbas et al (2014) found a knee-like feature in both MTS − Γ and MTS − Lγ correlations, where the anti-correlations become flat for Γ 225 or Lγ 10 51 erg/s.…”

“…Wu et al (2011) found a universal correlation between synchrotron luminosity and Doppler factor in GRBs and blazars, where they assumed the prompt emission of GRBs is dominated by synchrotron emission. Nemmen et al (2012) and Zhang et al (2013) found the efficiency of energy dissipation of jets is similar in GRBs and blazars. A similar case was also made for XRBs and low-luminosity AGNs (Ma et al 2014).…”