Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 454, Issue 3, Pages 2372-2380Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv2022
Keywords
accretion, accretion discs; black hole physics; relativistic processes; methods: numerical
Categories
Funding
- NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship - Chandra X-ray Center [PF4-150126]
- NSF [AST1312651]
- NASA [TCAN NNX14AB47G, NAS8-03060]
- NSF via XSEDE resources [TG-AST080026N]
- NASA via the High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1312651] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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We introduce a new method for treating Comptonization in computational fluid dynamics. By construction, this method conserves the number of photons. Whereas the traditional 'blackbody Comptonization' approach assumes that the radiation is locally a perfect blackbody and therefore uses a single parameter, the radiation temperature, to describe the radiation, the new 'photon-conserving Comptonization' approach treats the photon gas as a Bose-Einstein fluid and keeps track of both the radiation temperature and the photon number density. We have implemented photon-conserving Comptonization in the general relativistic radiation magnetohydrodynamical code KORAL and we describe its impact on simulations of mildly supercritical black hole accretion discs. We find that blackbody Comptonization underestimates the gas and radiation temperature by up to a factor of 2 compared to photon-conserving Comptonization. This discrepancy could be serious when computing spectra. The photon-conserving simulation indicates that the spectral colour correction factor of the escaping radiation in the funnel region of the disc could be as large as 5.
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