AAS 195th Meeting, January 2000
Session 65. Unification and Temporal Evolution of Active Galaxies
Oral, Thursday, January 13, 2000, 2:00-3:30pm, Regency VI

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[65.03] Central Engines & Accretion Mechanisms in Low-Luminosity AGN

N. M. Nagar, A. S. Wilson (University of Maryland, College Park), H. Falcke (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn.)

The Palomar spectroscopic survey of 486 nearby bright galaxies has shown that almost 50% of nearby bright galaxies host low-luminosity AGN (LLAGN; Ho et al. 1997). Our 2~cm radio survey of the 96 nearest LLAGN shows that at least 30% host compact, flat spectrum radio cores. Follow up milli-arcsec resolution imaging of the fifteen cores with the highest 2~cm flux has revealed high brightness temperature (> 108K) radio cores in all objects observed, with the six brightest cores even hosting parsec scale jets. This strongly suggests that at least 20--30% of LLAGN are accretion powered. Plotted on a log Pradio vs log Lemission-line diagram, all LLAGN in elliptical hosts, and most other LLAGN with compact radio cores, appear more closely related to radio galaxies than to `classical' Seyferts. We will use radio spectral indices to test current accretion theories for LLAGN, e.g. advection dominated accretion flows (ADAFs; e.g. Narayan et al. 1996) and the scaled jet model of Falcke & Biermann (1999), and also explore the relationships between black hole mass, core radio luminosity, and bulge luminosity.


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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: neil@astro.umd.edu

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