Black Hole Spins of Radio Sources

Abstract

A new approach to constraining or determining the spin of a massive black hole is proposed. A key parameter in the analysis is the dimensionless ratio, r, of the energy released to the mass of the hole. It is shown that the black hole spin, j, may be written as a function of the dimensionless ratio of the black hole spin energy to the black hole mass. When extraction of the black hole spin energy powers an outflow from the hole, the ratio r provides an indication of the black hole spin. The method is applied to a sample of 19 very powerful classical double radio galaxies with a range of size and redshift. The sources are found to have remarkably similar values of r and j, implying that the sources have very similar physical conditions at the time the outflow is generated. A sample of 29 central dominant galaxies is also studied; most of these sources have amorphous or FRI radio structure. The sources have a broad range of ratios r, and correspondingly broad range of black hole spins. The broad range probably results from the fact that each source is observed at a different stage in its lifetime. The intrinsic range of parameters could be as tight as it is for the powerful classical double radio galaxies.

To appear in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (3)

• Heating Hot Atmospheres with Active Galactic Nuclei
• Radiative Efficiency and Content of Extragalactic Radio Sources: Toward a Universal Scaling Relation Between Jet Power and Radio Power
• Cosmological Studies with Radio Galaxies and Supernovae

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Quasinormal modes of black holes and black branes
• AGN Jet Kinetic Power and the Energy Budget of Radio Galaxy Lobes
• Black Hole Spin and Accretion Disk Magnetic Field Strength Estimates for more than 750 AGN and Multiple GBH
• The Evolution of Radio Loud Active Galactic Nuclei as a Function of Black Hole Spin
• Estimates of Black Hole Spin Properties of 55 Sources
• RAiSE III: 3C radio AGN energetics and composition
• The duty cycle of radio galaxies revealed by LOFAR: remnant and restarted radio source populations in the Lockman Hole
• The contribution of spin to jet-disk coupling in black holes
• Cosmological Evolution of Supermassive Black Holes. II. Evidence for Downsizing of Spin Evolution
• Cen A as TeV gamma-ray and possible UHE cosmic-ray source
• Bounds on Black Hole Spins
• General relativistic rotational energy extraction from black holes-accretion disk systems
• Black Hole Spin Properties of 130 AGN
• The High Energy view of the Broad Line Radio Galaxy 3C 111
• Relating Kerr SMBHs in Active Galactic Nuclei to RAD configurations
• Dragged surfaces. On the accretion tori in the ergoregion
• Robust Supermassive Black Hole Spin Mass-Energy Characteristics: A New Method and Results
• On light surfaces in black hole thermodynamics
• On photons and matter inversion spheres from complex super-spinars accretion structures