Speaker
Description
The last three decades of observations have demonstrated that the mass of central super-massive black holes (SMBHs) correlates with a number of properties of their host galaxies, suggesting a connection between the growth of these massive compact objects and their host galaxy evolution (so-called "co-evolution”). Galaxy formation theories, however, still struggle to shed light on the physical processes driving and regulating such co-evolution. Understanding the nature of accretion onto SMBHs, as well as setting accurate constraints on fundamental properties such as their mass, is crucial in this regard.
In this talk, I will present the recent discovery of a tight correlation between the nuclear ALMA 1mm luminosities, SMBH masses, and 2-10 keV X-ray luminosities that is found to hold for both low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGN) and high-luminosity (quasar-like) AGN. This has been dubbed as the ``millimetre fundamental plane of BH accretion”. Crucially - for all AGN types - spectral energy distribution (SED) models for advection-dominated accretion flows (ADAFs) naturally explain the existence of the relation, which is instead not reproduced by standard torus-thin accretion disc models usually associated to high-luminosity AGN. I will discuss the implications of this discovery for our understanding of BH accretion in different AGN types, as well as its great potential as rapid method to (indirectly) estimate SMBH masses.