Grand Unification II: Hot Accretion and AGN Jets

We show that a quasi-spherical (QS) hot accretion flow is expected to operate in all SMBHs, with its rate being capped at ṁQS,max ∼ 0.001(M/10 M⊙) in units of the Eddington rate. It is then proposed that AGN jet power is proportional to the product of the hot accretion rate and a SMBH spin-dependent efficiency for energy extraction in the form of jets. Predictions from this model include (1) while radio jets should emerge from all SMBHs, the maximum jet power goes with SMBH mass approximately as 10(M/10 M⊙) erg/s, (2) even although there are two separate underlying populations of radio-quiet (RQ) and radio-loud (RL) AGNs, any bimodality in the observed AGN radio loudness distribution is likely due to a selection effect, such as some imposed optical magnitude limits, (3) the RL fraction of quasars is expected to decrease with redshift in the cold dark matter model, (4) host galaxies of RQ and RL quasars should be drawn from the same underlying elliptical galaxy population, although RL quasars may have SMBHs that are somewhat more massive than their RQ counterparts and RL quasars may reside predominantly in core elliptical galaxies, (5) RL low-luminosity AGNs and LINERs may represent the long, declining “trailing” phase following the initial, more luminous AGN phase, (6) a broad anti-correlation between radio-loudness and disk accretion rate is expected, (7) RL AGNs may be expected to be more abundant in Type Ia supernovae than RQ AGNs, (8) among RL AGNs a correlation between radio power and clustering strength is predicted, and (9) RQ and RL AGNs should have, on average, similar IR-optical-UV properties. Subject headings: black hole physics galaxies: active galaxies: bulges galaxies: interactions radio continuum: galaxies quasars: general