2015MNRAS.448.1893M

Jet ejection by accreting black holes is a mass invariant mechanism unifying stellar and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that should also apply for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), which are thought to be the seeds from which SMBHs form. We present the detection of an off-nuclear IMBH of ∼ 5x10⁴ M_☉ located in an unusual spiral arm of the galaxy NGC 2276 based on quasi-simultaneous Chandra X-ray observations and European VLBI Network (EVN) radio observations. The IMBH, NGC2276-3c, possesses a 1.8 pc radio jet that is oriented in the same direction as large-scale ( ∼ 650 pc) radio lobes and whose emission is consistent with flat to optically thin synchrotron emission between 1.6 and 5 GHz. Its jet kinetic power (4x10⁴⁰ erg/s) is comparable to its radiative output and its jet efficiency ( ≥ 46 percent) is as large as that of SMBHs. A region of ∼ 300 pc along the jet devoid of young stars could provide observational evidence of jet feedback from an IMBH. The discovery confirms that the accretion physics is mass invariant and that seed IMBHs in the early Universe possibly had powerful jets that were an important source of feedback.