Jet enhanced accretion growth of supermassive black holes

Abstract

We investigate the effect of a disc-driven jet on the accretion growth of cosmological supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The presence of a jet enhances the mass growth rate because for a given luminosity, the mass accretion rate, is higher (or equivalently, the radiative efficiency e_r is lower for a fixed mass accretion rate) than that predicted by standard accretion disc theory. As jets carry away very little of the accreting matter, a larger proportion of the rest mass can reach the black hole during episodes of jet activity. We show quantitatively that the conditions required to grow a rapidly spinning black hole to a mass ~ 10^9 solar masses by redshift z ~ 6, whilst satisfying the observational constraint e_r > 0.1, are considerably less restrictive for jet-enhanced disc accretion than for standard disc accretion, which requires implausibly high super-Eddington accretion rates. Furthermore, jet-enhanced accretion growth offers a viable explanation for the observed correlation between black hole mass and radio-loudness of quasars.

References in corpus (8)

• Black hole masses and enrichment of z ~ 6 SDSS quasars
• Measuring the kinetic power of AGN in the radio mode
• Fuelling Active Galactic Nuclei
• Outflows and the Physical Properties of Quasars
• Angular momentum transport in protostellar discs
• The kinetic luminosity function and the jet production efficiency of growing black holes
• Towards a New Standard Theory for Astrophysical Disk Accretion
• Constraints on jet-driven disk accretion in Sagittarius A*

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Feedback from central black holes in elliptical galaxies. I: models with either radiative or mechanical feedback but not both