A universal relationship between the variability timescale and black hole mass in black hole jetted and non-jetted accreting systems

TL;DR

This study reveals a universal linear relationship between variability timescales and black hole mass across a wide range of systems, supporting a common accretion mechanism and suggesting jet properties are mass-independent.

Contribution

It extends the known correlation between variability timescales and black hole mass by including 125 new non-jetted AGNs, confirming a universal relation across different black hole systems.

Findings

Mass-scaled variability timescales linearly relate to black hole mass.

The slope of this relation matches recent theoretical predictions.

Jet properties appear largely independent of black hole mass.

Abstract

A long-term variability study spanning a range of black hole mass systems, from microquasars hosting stellar-mass black holes to active galactic nuclei (AGNs) harboring supermassive black holes, provides new insights into the physics of relativistic jets. In this work, we investigate the optical variability of both jetted and nonjetted AGNs. We apply a stochastic process known as the Damped Random Walk (DRW) to model light curves from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) DR23. Our results show that the mass-scaled characteristic timescales across the black hole mass exhibit a linear relationship with a slope of 0.35-0.50. This analysis confirms a previously observed correlation between the damping timescales and black hole mass and extends it by incorporating 125 newly identified non-jetted AGNs selected from the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) AGN catalogue. The derived slope of the relation between the damping timescales and black hole mass aligns with recent theoretical predictions, supporting the presence of a universal accretion mechanism in AGNs across different mass scales. Furthermore, our findings suggest a novel implication: the properties and production mechanisms of relativistic jets may be largely independent of black hole mass.