On The Relation Between the AGN Jet and Accretion Disk Emissions

TL;DR

This paper investigates the true intrinsic correlation between AGN jet emissions and accretion disk luminosities, revealing a weaker, sub-linear relationship after accounting for observational biases, which impacts our understanding of their physical connection.

Contribution

The study introduces methods to accurately determine the intrinsic luminosity correlation by correcting for observational selection effects and cosmological evolution.

Findings

Intrinsic correlation is weaker than observed.

Luminosity relation is sub-linear.

Implications for jet and accretion disk physics.

Abstract

Active galactic nuclei jets are detected via their radio and/or gamma-ray emissions while the accretion disks are detected by their optical and UV radiation. Observations of the radio and optical luminosities show a strong correlation between the two luminosities. However, part of this correlation is due to the redshift or distances of the sources that enter in calculating the luminosities from the observed fluxes and part of it could be due to the differences in the cosmological evolution of luminosities. Thus, the determination of the intrinsic correlations between the luminosities is not straightforward. It is affected by the observational selection effects and other factors that truncate the data, sometimes in a complex manner (e.g. Antonucci (2011) and Pavildou et al. (2010)). In this paper we describe methods that allow us to determine the evolution of the radio and optical luminosities, and determine the true intrinsic correlation between the two luminosities. We find a much weaker correlation than observed and sub-linear relations between the luminosities. This has a significant implication for jet and accretion disk physics.