On the location of the supermassive black hole in CTA 102

Abstract

Relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei represent one of the most powerful phenomena in the Universe. They form in the surroundings of the supermassive black holes as a by-product of accretion onto the central black hole in active galaxies. The flow in the jets propagates at velocities close to the speed of light. The distance between the first part of the jet that is visible in radio images (core) and the black hole is still a matter of debate. Only very-long-baseline interferometry observations resolve the innermost compact regions of the radio jet. Those can access the jet base, and combining data at different wavelenghts, address the physical parameters of the outflow from its emission. We have performed an accurate analysis of the frequency-dependent shift of the VLBI core location for a multi-wavelength set of images of the blazar CTA 102 including data from 6 cm down to 3 mm. The measure of the position of the central black hole, with mass $\sim 10^{8.93}{M}_{\odot }$, in the blazar CTA 102 reveals a distance of $\sim 8\times 10^4$ gravitational radii to the 86 GHz core, in agreement with similar measures obtained for other blazars and distant radio galaxies, and in contrast with recent results for the case of nearby radio galaxies, which show distances between the black hole and the radio core that can be two orders of magnitude smaller.

4 pages, 2 figures

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Radio observations of active galactic nuclei with mm-VLBI
• POLAMI: Polarimetric Monitoring of Active Galactic Nuclei at Millimetre Wavelengths. II. Widespread circular polarisation
• Observation of a sudden cessation of a very-high-energy gamma-ray flare in PKS 1510-089 with H.E.S.S. and MAGIC in May 2016
• Flare-like Variability of the Mg~II $\lambda$2798 Å Emission Line and UV Fe~II band in the Blazar CTA~102
• Unravelling the Innermost Jet Structure of OJ 287 with the First GMVA+ALMA Observations
• High-precision Astrometric Millimeter Very Long Baseline Interferometry Using a New Method for Multi-Frequency Calibration
• Discovery of a wandering radio jet base after a large X-ray flare in the blazar Markarian 421
• Time variability of the core-shift effect in the blazar 3C 454.3
• Jet Collimation and Acceleration in the Flat Spectrum Radio Quasar 1928+738
• The Science Case for Simultaneous mm-Wavelength Receivers in Radio Astronomy
• Gamma-ray flares from the jet of the blazar CTA 102 in 2016-2018