A new look at radio loud AGN unification

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2012-06-20

Department

Program

Citation of Original Publication

Markos Georganopoulos et al., A New Look at Radio Loud AGN Unification, AGN Physics in the CTA Era (AGN 2011), Vol 141, DOI: https://doi.org/10.22323/1.141.0021

Rights

This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Subjects

Abstract

We review some open issues on our understanding of the radio loud AGN unification and the blazar sequence, and discuss the results of our recent work [Meyer et al.(2011)] and current and future work in the direction of developing an extension of the unification scheme. In the scheme we envisage, sources jets with accretion power greater than ∼ 10−2 of the Eddington luminosity [Narayan et al.(1997), Ghisellini et al.(2009)] have jets that emanate from the vicinity of radiatively efficient accretion disks with strong broad line regions, and the jets are characterized by a single flow velocity. Sources with accretion power less than ∼ 10−2 of the Eddington luminosity have jets that emanate from the vicinity of radiatively inefficient accretion disks with weak or no broad emission line regions, and the jet flows exhibit velocity gradients in the form of a decelerating [Georganopoulos & Kazanas(2003)] and/or a fast spine/slow sheath flow [Ghisellini et al.(2005)]. The phenomenology of a source, therefore, depends on its accretion environment, the jet power, and the jet orientation relative to the line of sight. The situation emerging from Fermi observations is briefly discussed along with ways to evaluate this scheme through comparison to observations.