The mass fraction of AGN and the Fundamental Plane of black hole activity from a large X-ray selected sample of LINERs

Understand

A sample of 576 X-ray selected LINERs was constructed by combining data from the 3XMM-DR4 and SDSS-DR7 catalogues.

• The sample was used to investigate the fraction of galaxies hosting a LINER, finding that the fraction is a strong function of both stellar mass and black hole mass (scaling to the power of 1.6 +/- 0.2 and 0.6 +/- 0.1 respectively) and that it rises close to unity at the highest black hole masses and lowest X-ray luminosities.
• After obtaining radio flux densities from the FIRST survey, the sample was also used to investigate the Fundamental Plane of black hole activity - a scale-invariant relationship between black hole mass, X-ray luminosity and radio luminosity that is believed to hold across at least nine orders of magnitude of mass.
• There are key advantages in using only LINERs for the derivation as these are the counterparts of the "low-hard" X-ray binaries for which the relationship is tightest.