Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21831704t&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #317.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Radio loud active galactic nuclei are on average 1000 times brighter in the radio band than radio quiet ones. We investigate whether this radio loud/quiet dichotomy can be due to differences in the spin of central black holes (BHs) that power the radio emitting jets. We construct steady state axisymmetric numerical models for a wide range of BH spin, a. We assume that the magnetic flux that threads the BH is held constant. For a BH surrounded by a thin accretion disk, we find that the conventional expression for BH power, P a^2, is accurate to within a factor of a few. We conclude that in this scenario differences in spin can account for power variations of at most a few tens. However, if the disk is thick, the power variation becomes much steeper, P a^4 or even a^6. Power variations of 1000 are then possible for realistic BH spin distributions. We derive an analytic solution that accurately reproduces the steeper scaling of jet power with spin.
McKinney Jonathan C.
Narayan Ramesh
Tchekhovskoy Alexander
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