Discovery of a Flat-Spectrum Radio Nucleus in NGC 3115

Abstract

The early-type galaxy NGC 3115, at a distance of 10.2 Mpc, hosts the nearest billion-solar-mass black hole. Wong et al. recently inferred a substantial Bondi accretion rate near the black hole. Bondi-like accretion is thought to fuel outflows, which can be traced through their radio emission. This paper reports the discovery of a radio nucleus in NGC 3115, with a diameter less that 0.17 arcsec (8.4 pc), a luminosity at 8.5 GHz of 3.1 x 10^35 ergs/s and a flat spectrum (alpha = -0.23+/-0.20, flux density ~ frequency^alpha). The radio source coincides with the galaxy's photocenter and candidate X-ray nucleus. The emission is radio-loud, suggesting the presence of an outflow on scales less than 10 pc. On such scales, the Bondi accretion could be impeded by heating due to disruption of the outflow.

4 pages; 1 figure; emulateapj.cls; to appear in AJ

References in corpus (4)

• Heating Hot Atmospheres with Active Galactic Nuclei
• Radiatively Inefficient Accretion in Nearby Galaxies
• The Fundamental Plane of Accretion Onto Black Holes with Dynamical Masses
• AGN activity and the misaligned hot ISM in the compact radio elliptical NGC4278

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The Local Nanohertz Gravitational-Wave Landscape From Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
• Exploring the mass assembly of the early-type disc galaxy NGC3115 with MUSE
• The Megasecond Chandra XVP Observation of NGC 3115: Witnessing the Flow of Hot Gas within the Bondi Radius
• A Multi-wavelength Study of the Turbulent Central Engine of the Low-mass AGN hosted by NGC404
• Fundamental Plane of Black Hole Activity in Quiescent Regime
• An off-centered active galactic nucleus in NGC 3115
• The multiwavelength spectrum of NGC 3115: Hot accretion flow properties
• Recovering the origins of the lenticular galaxy NGC 3115 using multi-band imaging
• Modeling Hot Gas Flow in the Low-Luminosity Active Galactic Nucleus of NGC3115
• Suppressing hot gas accretion to supermassive black holes by stellar winds
• Hot Gas Flows on Parsec Scale in the Low-Luminosity Active Galactic Nucleus NGC 3115
• Investigating the Candidate Displaced Active Galactic Nucleus in NGC 3115
• Evaluating the efficacy of a data cube treatment procedure for kinematic analyses: application to NGC 3115 and NGC 4699