Surveying Flux Density in Galaxies with Apparent Large Black Holes at Millimeter/Submillimeter Wavelengths

Abstract

We present millimeter and submillimeter continuum observations for 36 sources with potentially large black hole shadows at 230 and 345 GHz using the Submillimeter Array. The sources are selected based on the criterion of the large diameter of the black hole shadows. Our motivation is to explore the nature of the accretion flow of the potential candidates of low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs) through photometry at millimeter/submillimeter wavelengths. The detected result serves as the pathfinder of future high-angular resolution observations such as the Event Horizon Telescope. As a result, we successfully detected 17 and eight sources at 230 and 345 GHz, respectively. We reveal that three of the detected sources (IC 310, NGC 1277, and NGC 5846) show significant excess at millimeter/submillimeter wavelengths in comparison with the extrapolation both from low-frequency radio and infrared, which are considered to be attributed to the extended jet and dust component, respectively. One possible explanation is that these excesses are associated with the hot accretion flow onto the supermassive black holes of the LLAGNs. By adopting the advection-dominated accretion flow model's semi-analytic model, we obtained the upper bound of the mass accretion rate. Those are less than 10 ^−2 ${\dot{M}}_{\mathrm{EDD}}$ , where ${\dot{M}}_{\mathrm{EDD}}$ is the Eddington mass accretion rate computed via the Eddington luminosity. This is in good agreement with the expected range of the LLAGNs. The ∼200 mJy flux densities and negative spectral index of IC 1459 within millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths make it a promising candidate for future submillimeter high-angular resolution experiments for imaging the black hole shadow.

Keywords

• Low-luminosity active galactic nuclei
• Submillimeter astronomy
• Millimeter astronomy
• Radio astronomy
• Accretion
• Black hole physics