Low-mass and high-mass supermassive black holes in radio-loud AGNs are spun-up in different evolution paths

Abstract

How supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are spun-up is a key issue in modern astrophysics. As an extension to the study in Wang et al., here we address the issue by comparing the host galaxy properties of nearby (z < 0.05) radio-selected Seyfert 2 galaxies. With the two-dimensional bulge+disk decompositions for the SDSS r-band images, we identify a dichotomy in various host galaxy properties for radio-loud SMBHs. By assuming that radio emission from the jet reflects a high SMBH spin, which stems from the well-known Blandford-Znajek mechanism of jet production, high-mass SMBHs (i.e., M_BH > 10 7.9 M_⊙) have a preference for being spun-up in classical bulges, and low-mass SMBHs (i.e., M_BH= 10⁶⁻⁷ M_⊙) in pseudo-bulges. This dichotomy suggests and confirms that high-mass and low-mass SMBHs are spun-up in different ways, i.e., a major “dry” merger and a secular evolution respectively.