Correlation Between Radio Loudness and the Eddington Ratio in Quasars

Abstract

Quasars can be categorized into radio‐loud and radio‐quiet populations based on radio properties. The physical mechanisms underlying this dichotomy have long been an active area of investigation. In this work, we analyze multi‐wavelength data from 851 quasars matched between the SDSS DR14 and FIRST catalogs, requiring emission line measurements with signal‐to‐noise ratios > 3, we fit quasar optical continuum spectra and compute the radio loudness, luminosities, and Eddington ratios. We classify quasars as radio‐loud or radio‐quiet using a dividing line of . We find that the distribution of the Eddington ratio and radio luminosity is different between the radio‐loud and radio‐quiet quasars, and the correlation between the Eddington ratio and radio loudness is disparate as well. The Eddington ratio shows a weakly positive correlation with radio loudness in both the whole sample and radio‐loud quasars, which imply that the Eddington ratio contributes to the radio loudness but it is not the dominant factor and that additional factors influence relativistic jet production in radio‐loud quasars. However, the Eddington ratio is anti‐correlated with radio loudness in radio‐quiet quasars, potentially related to the properties of the accretion disk.