Discovering the Mass-Scaled Damping Timescale from Microquasars to Blazars

TL;DR

This study identifies a linear relationship between mass-scaled damping timescales of variability in black hole systems from microquasars to blazars, suggesting a connection between accretion disk processes and jet activity across different mass scales.

Contribution

It introduces a method to measure damping timescales across a range of black hole systems and reveals a universal scaling law linking these timescales to black hole mass.

Findings

Mass-scaled damping timescales linearly relate to black hole mass with a slope of ~0.57.

Damping timescales in blazars are associated with jet activity, likely linked to X-ray variability in microquasars.

The observed timescale aligns with the viscous timescale of the optical accretion disk, indicating a disk-jet connection.

Abstract

Studying the variability of the accretion disks of black holes and jets is important to identify their internal physical processes. In this letter, we obtain the characteristic damping timescale of 34 blazars and seven microquasars from the Fermi-Large Area Telescope and the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, respectively. We found that the mass-scaled characteristic timescales, ranging from the microquasars of stellar-mass black holes to the blazars of supermassive black holes, exhibited a linear relationship with a slope of $\sim$0.57. Given the fact the damping timescales of the $\gamma$-ray in the blazars are associated with the jet, we propose that the timescales of the X-ray in these microquasars are also related with the jet. The mass-scaled damping timescale that we found was consistent with the radiation of the optical accretion disk. This can be attributed to the viscous timescale at the ultraviolet-emitting radii of the disk, which can affect the jet. Our study provides a new perspective on the origin of the region of radiation and the possible disk--jet connection based on time-domain analysis.