What powers the most relativistic jets? – I. BL Lacs

Authors:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The dramatic relativistic jets pointing directly at us in BL Lacertae (BL Lac) objects can be well modelled by bulk motion beaming of synchrotron self-Compton emission powered by a low Eddington fraction accretion flow. Nearly 500 of these active galactic nuclei (AGN) are seen in the second Fermi Large Area Telescope catalogue of AGN. We combine the jet models which describe individual spectra with the expected jet parameter scalings with mass and mass accretion rate to predict the expected number of Fermi detected sources given the number densities of AGN from cosmological simulations. We select only sources with Eddington scaled mass accretion rate 0.8) black holes, in agreement with the longstanding spin–jet paradigm. This also requires that high spins are intrinsically rare, as predicted by the cosmological simulations for growing black hole mass via chaotic (randomly aligned) accretion episodes, where only the most massive black holes have high spin due to black hole–black hole mergers.
All Related Versions

This publication has 45 references indexed in Scilit: