Black Hole Jet Unification in the Fermi Era

Abstract

AGNs and GRBs produce powerful relativistic jets and their central engines share the same basic astrophysical ingredients, despite the vastly different mass scales. Using Fermi and Swift observations, we find evidence that the jets produced by blazars and GRBs follow the same correlation between the gamma-ray luminosity and kinetic power. This result suggests that jet production and energy dissipation mechanisms are remarkably similar over 10 orders of magnitude in jet power, establishing a physical analogy between AGN and GRBs. We discuss the implications of these results and the road ahead.