Landing page for project EL075

The elliptical galaxy M60 at a distance of 16.5 Mpc hosts an active nucleus with a very low luminosity and an extremely low accretion rate. Because of the high Galactic latitude, the scatter-broadening effect by the interstellar medium (ISM) could be negligible. Compared to the well-known source Sgr A*, M60 is a better target for investigating the origin of radio emission from an extremely low accretion rate system. The first high-resolution VLBA images reveal a compact core with a total flux of 20 mJy at 4.4 and 7.6 GHz. The continuum spectrum at radio bands and core size versus frequency relationship indicated that the observed subpc-scale compact core possibly results from a partially self-absorbed jet base or an advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF) with an additional power-law component at low frequency from a nonthermal electron. We propose VLBA observations to test whether the radio jets exist and to improve our understanding of the connection between inflows and outflows in the so far unexplored domain of extremely low accretion rates. We propose to observe M60 with EVN at 1.6 GHz to detect the subparsec-scale jets.

This data is part of the archive of VLBI data maintained by JIVE on behalf of the EVN, a network of radio telescopes located primarily in Europe and Asia, with additional antennas in South Africa. The EVN archive itself has the DOI https://doi.org/10.17616/R3Z197