Revisit the fundamental plane of black-hole activity from sub-Eddington to quiescent state

TL;DR

This study reexamines the fundamental plane of black-hole activity across different states, confirming its consistency from sub-Eddington to quiescent states and supporting the extension of the radio--X-ray correlation into very low luminosity regimes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the fundamental plane relation holds for quiescent black holes and extends the radio--X-ray correlation to highly sub-Eddington states, with implications for black hole accretion models.

Findings

Quiescent black holes follow the fundamental plane well.

FR I radio galaxies deviate with a steeper track.

Highly sub-Eddington sources still align with the correlation.

Abstract

It is very controversial whether radio--X-ray correlation as defined in LH state of XRBs can extend to quiescent state (e.g., X-ray luminosity less than a critical value of $L_{\rm X,c} \sim10^{-5.5}L_{\rm Edd}$) or not. In this work, we collect a sample of XRBs and low luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs) with wide distribution of Eddington ratios to reexplore the fundamental plane between 5 GHz radio luminosity, $L_{\rm R}$, 2-10 keV X-ray luminosity, $L_{\rm X}$, and black hole (BH) mass, $M_{\rm BH}$, namely $\log L_{\rm R}=\xi_{\rm X} \log L_{\rm X}+\xi_{\rm M}\log M_{\rm BH}+\rm constant$. For the whole sample, we confirm the former fundamental plane of Merloni et al. and Falcke et al. that $\xi_{\rm X}\sim 0.6$ and $\xi_{\rm M}\sim 0.8$ even after including more quiescent BHs. The quiescent BHs follow the fundamental plane very well, and, however, FR I radio galaxies follow a steeper track comparing other BH sources. After excluding FR Is, we investigate the fundamental plane for BHs in quiescent state with $L_{\rm X}< L_{\rm X,c}$ and sub-Eddington BHs with $L_{\rm X}> L_{\rm X,c}$ respectively, and both subsamples have a similar slope, $\xi_{\rm X}\sim0.6$, which support that quiescent BHs may behave similar to those in low-hard state. We further select two subsamples of AGNs with BH mass in a narrow range (FR Is with $M_{\rm BH}=10^{8.8\pm0.4}$ and other LLAGNs with $M_{\rm BH}=10^{8.0\pm0.4}$) to simulate the behavior of a single supermassive BH evolving from sub-Eddington to quiescent state. We find that the highly sub-Eddington sources with $L_{\rm X}/L_{\rm Edd}\sim10^{-6}-10^{-9}$ still roughly stay on the extension of radio--X-ray correlation as defined by other sub-Eddington BHs. Our results are consistent with several recent observations in XRBs that the radio--X-ray correlation as defined in low-hard state can extend to highly sub-Eddington quiescent state.