BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey - The parsec scale jet properties of the ultra hard X-ray selected local AGNs

  • Published : 2019.04.10

Abstract

We have conducted a 22 GHz very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) survey of 281 local (z < 0.05) active galactic nuclei (AGNs) selected from the Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) 70-month ultra hard X-ray (14-195 keV) catalog. The main goal is to investigate the relation between the strengths of black hole accretion and the parsec-scale nuclear jet, which is expected to tightly correlate but has not been observationally confirmed yet. The BAT AGN Spectroscopic Survey (BASS) provides the least biased AGN sample against obscuration including both Seyfert types, hence it makes an ideal parent sample for studying the nuclear jet properties of an overall AGN population. Using the Korean VLBI Network (KVN), the KVN and VERA Array (KaVA), and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), we observed 281 objects with a 22 GHz flux > 30 mJy, detecting 11 targets (~4% of VLBI detection rate). This implies that the fraction of X-ray AGNs which are currently ejecting a strong nuclear jet is very small. Although our 11 sources span a wide range of pc-scale morphological types, from compact to complex, they lie on a tight linear relation between accretion luminosity and nuclear jet luminosity. Our finding may indicate that the power of nuclear jet is directly responsible for the amount of black hole accretion. We also have probed the fundamental plane of black hole activity in VLBI scale (e.g., few milli-arcsecond). The results from our high-frequency VLBI radio study support that the change of jet luminosity and size follows what is predicted by the AGN evolution scenario based on the Eddington ratio (ƛ$_{Edd}$) - column density ($N_H$) plane, proposed by a previous study.

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