X-ray and radio emission of type 1 AGNs

Supermassive black hole masses are estimated from the Mg II emission line, bolometric luminosities from the X-ray data, and radio emission or upper limits from the FIRST catalogue. Most of the sources accrete close to the Eddington limit and the distribution in radio-loudness does not appear to have a bi-modal behaviour. We confirm that radio-loud AGN are also X-ray loud, with an X-ray-to-optical ratio up to twice that of radio-quiet objects, even excluding the most extreme strongly jetted sources.

By analysing complementary radio-selected control samples, we find evidence that these conclusions are not an effect of the X-ray selection, but are likely a property of the dominant QSO population. Our findings are best interpreted in a context where radio emission in AGN, with the exception of a minority of beamed sources, arises from very close to the accretion disk and is therefore heavily linked to X-ray emission.

We also speculate that the radio-loud/radio-quiet dichotomy might either be an evolutionary effect that developed well after the QSO peak epoch, or an effect of incompleteness in small samples.