The relation between star formation rate and accretion rate in LINERs

Abstract

It is argued that there is a linear correlation between star formation rate (SFR) and accretion rate for normal bright active galactic nuclei (AGNs). However, it is still unclear whether this correlation holds for LINERs, of which the accretion rates are relatively lower than those of normal bright AGNs. The radiatively inefficient accretion flows (RIAFs) are believed to be present in these LINERs. In this work, we derive accretion rates for a sample of LINERs from their hard X-ray luminosities based on spectral calculations for RIAFs. We find that LINERs follow the same correlation between star formation rate and accretion rate defined by normal bright AGNs, when reasonable parameters are adopted for RIAFs. It means that the gases feed the black hole and star formation in these low-luminosity LINERs may follow the same way as that in normal bright AGNs, which is roughly consistent with recent numerical simulations on quasar evolution.