The jet/disk connection in blazars

TL;DR

This paper explores the connection between blazar jets and accretion disks using high-energy data, revealing that jets often surpass disk luminosity and are powered mainly by matter's bulk motion, with implications for black hole growth.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale evaluation of jet and accretion powers in units of Eddington luminosity, highlighting the dominance of matter's bulk motion in jet power and the presence of supermassive black holes at high redshifts.

Findings

Blazar jets often have powers comparable to or exceeding their accretion disk luminosity.

Jet power is mainly due to bulk matter motion, not Poynting flux.

Supermassive black holes (>1 billion solar masses) exist at redshift ~3.

Abstract

The new high energy data coming mainly from the Fermi and Swift satellites and from the ground based Cerenkov telescopes are making possible to study not only the energetics of blazar jets, but also their connection to the associated accretion disks. Furthermore, the black hole mass of the most powerful objects can be constrained through IR-optical emission, originating in the accretion disks. For the first time, we can evaluate jet and accretion powers in units of the Eddington luminosity for a large number of blazars. Firsts results are intriguing. Blazar jets have powers comparable to, and often larger than the luminosity produced by their accretion disk. Blazar jets are produced at all accretion rates (in Eddington units), and their appearance depends if the accretion regime is radiatively efficient or not. The jet power is dominated by the bulk motion of matter, not by the Poynting flux, at least in the jet region where the bulk of the emission is produced, at ~1000 Schwarzschild radii. The mechanism at the origin of relativistic jets must be very efficient, possibly more than accretion, even if accretion must play a crucial role. Black hole masses for the most powerful jets at redshift ~3 exceed one billion solar masses, flagging the existence of a very large population of heavy black holes at these redshifts.