The Jet-Disk Connection and Blazar Unification

By L. Maraschi, F. Tavecchio. 2002

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We discuss the relation between the power carried by relativistic jets and the nuclear power provided by accretion for a group of blazars, including flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) and BL Lac objects. They are characterized by good-quality broadband X-ray data provided by the BeppoSAX satellite. The jet powers are estimated using physical parameters determined from uniformly modeling their spectral energy distributions. Our analysis indicates that for FSRQs the total jet power is of the same order as the accretion power. We suggest that blazar jets are likely powered by energy extraction from a rapidly spinning black hole (BH) through the magnetic field provided by the accretion disk. FSRQs must have large BH masses (108-109 M☉) and high, near-Eddington accretion rates. For BL Lac objects, the jet luminosity is larger than the disk luminosity. This can be understood within the same scenario if BL Lac objects have masses similar to FSRQs but accrete at largely subcritical rates, whereby the accretion disk radiates inefficiently. Thus, the "unification" of the two classes into a single blazar population, previously proposed on the basis of a spectral sequence governed by luminosity, finds a physical basis.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24b96be81e21260b97a3e655356e6a9c37928df8

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Citations in the corpus

The blazar sequence: a new perspective (2008, background): “We showed that the jet Poynting flux is smaller, and also that the component of the jet power possibly transported by electron– positron pairs cannot be dynamically important (see also Sikora & Madejski 2000; Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003).”
A Survey of Extended Radio Jets with Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope (2004, background): “…both FR I and FR II host galaxies have similar gas halos (e.g., Gambill et al. 2003), the discriminating parameter becomes the jet pressure, which is related to the jet power (Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003): the more luminous sources (FR II galaxies) are slowed down later than the less luminous ones.”
A Measurement of the Electromagnetic Luminosity of a Kerr Black Hole (2004, background): “Despite some hints (e.g. Wilms et al. 2001, Miller et al. 2002, Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003) and the general consistency of this idea with the data, however, there is no direct observational evidence for black hole energy extraction.”
Hot Accretion Flows Around Black Holes (2014, background): “…Yuan et al. 2002b, Pellegrini et al. 2003, Ptak et al. 2004, Nemmen et al. 2006, Xu & Cao 2009, Liu & Wu 2013, Nemmen et al. 2014), BL Lac objects (Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003), FR I sources (Reynolds et al. 1996, Begelman & Celotti 2004, Wu et al. 2007, Yuan et al. 2009c, Yu et al. 2011), X-ray…”
General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the jet formation and large-scale propagation from black hole accretion systems (2006, background): “Prior work suggested that the BZ power is insufficient to account for Blazar emission (Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003), where they assumed that Γ ∼ 10 and θj ∼ 15◦.”
The Fermi blazars' divide (2009, background): “…& Saunders (1991), and since then confirmed by c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS000, 000–000 several works (e.g. Celotti et al. 1997; Cavaliere & D’Elia 200 ; D’Elia, Padovani & Landt 2003; Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003; Sambruna et al. 2006; Allen et al. 2006; Celotti & Ghisellini 2008; Kataoka et al. 2008).”
TeV BL Lac objects at the dawn of the Fermi era (2009, methodology): “…from https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/401/3/1570/1091074 by guest on 28 July 2018 Figure 2 – continued 5 MO D E L L I N G O F TH E S P E C T R A L E N E R G Y DISTRIBU TIONS We use the one-zone synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) model fully described in Maraschi & Tavecchio (2003).”
The power of blazar jets (2007, background): “If there were no electron–positron pairs, the inferred jet powers are 10–100 times larger than the diskaccretion luminosity, in agreement with earlier claims based on individual sources or smaller blazar samples (Ghisellini 1999;Celotti 2001; Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003; Sambruna et al. 2006).”
Neutral Beams from Blazar Jets (2002, background): “Maraschi & Tavecchio (2003) argue that this picture accounts for the correlation between the radio jet and accretion power, where the latter is inferred from emission-line strengths.”
Extreme TeV blazars and the intergalactic magnetic field (2010, methodology): “We use the one-zone leptonic emission model fully described in Maraschi & Tavecchio (2003).”
Are Quasar Jets Dominated by Poynting Flux? (2005, background): “Jet powers inferred from the energetics of radio lobes and hot spots cluster around 1046 erg s−1 (Rawlings & Saunders 1991; Willott et al. 1999; D’Elia, Padovani & Landt 2003; Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003).”
FERMI/LARGE AREA TELESCOPE DISCOVERY OF GAMMA-RAY EMISSION FROM A RELATIVISTIC JET IN THE NARROW-LINE QUASAR PMN J0948+0022 (2009, background): “…to radiatively inefficient accretion flows and relatively weak jets, while in the second one the accretion rate is near critical, giving rise to bright disks and powerful jets (Ghisellini & Celotti 2001, Maraschi 2001, Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003; see, however, also Blandford & Levinson 1995).”
General physical properties of bright Fermi blazars (2009, background): “6 shows what we think is the main result of our work (see also Maraschi & Tavecchio 2003, Sambruna et al. 2006 for earlier results).”