4.7 Article

Super-Eddington Accretion Disks around Supermassive Black Holes

Journal

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL
Volume 880, Issue 2, Pages -

Publisher

IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab29ff

Keywords

accretion, accretion disks; magnetohydrodynamics (MHD); methods: numerical; quasars: supermassive black holes; radiative transfer

Funding

  1. National Science Foundation [NSF PHY-1125915, 17-48958, AST-1333091, AST-1715277]
  2. NASA Astrophysics Theory Program [80NSSC18K1018]
  3. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
  4. Virginia Space Grant Consortium New Investigator award
  5. DOE Office of Science User Facility [DE-AC02-06CH11357]
  6. National Science Foundation (NSF) [ACI-1053575]

Ask authors/readers for more resources

We use global three-dimensional radiation magnetohydrodynamical simulations to study accretion disks onto a 5 x 10(8) M-circle dot black hole with accretion rates varying from similar to 250L(Edd)/c(2) to 520L(Edd)/c(2). We initialize the disks with a weakly magnetized torus centered at either 50 or 80 gravitational radii, leading to self-consistent turbulence generated by the magnetorotational instability (MRI). The inner regions of all disks have radiation pressure similar to 10(4)-10(6) times the gas pressure. Nonaxisymmetric density waves that steepen into spiral shocks form as gas flows toward the black hole. Maxwell stress from MRI turbulence can be larger than the Reynolds stress only when the net vertical magnetic flux is sufficiently large. Outflows are formed with a speed of similar to 0.1-0.4c. When the accretion rate is smaller than similar to 500L(Edd)/c(2), outflows are launched from similar to 10 gravitational radii, and the radiative efficiency is similar to 5%-7%. For an accretion rate reaching 1500L(Edd)/c(2), most of the funnel region near the rotation axis becomes optically thick, and the outflow is launched from beyond 50 gravitational radii. The radiative efficiency is reduced to 1%. We always find that the kinetic energy luminosity associated with the outflow is at most similar to 15%-30% of the radiative luminosity. The mass flux in the outflow is similar to 15%-50% of the net mass accretion rates. We discuss the implications of our simulation results on the observational properties of these disks.

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