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Launching of Active Galactic Nuclei Jets

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The Formation and Disruption of Black Hole Jets

Part of the book series: Astrophysics and Space Science Library ((ASSL,volume 414))

Abstract

As black holes accrete gas, they often produce relativistic, collimated outflows, or jets. Jets are expected to form in the vicinity of a black hole, making them powerful probes of strong-field gravity. However, how jet properties (e.g., jet power) connect to those of the accretion flow (e.g., mass accretion rate) and the black hole (e.g., black hole spin) remains an area of active research. This is because what determines a crucial parameter that controls jet properties—the strength of large-scale magnetic flux threading the black hole—remains largely unknown. First-principles computer simulations show that due to this, even if black hole spin and mass accretion rate are held constant, the simulated jet powers span a wide range, with no clear winner. This limits our ability to use jets as a quantitative diagnostic tool of accreting black holes. Recent advances in computer simulations demonstrated that accretion disks can accumulate large-scale magnetic flux on the black hole, until the magnetic flux becomes so strong that it obstructs gas infall and leads to a magnetically-arrested disk (MAD). Recent evidence suggests that central black holes in jetted active galactic nuclei and tidal disruptions are surrounded by MADs. Since in MADs both the black hole magnetic flux and the jet power are at their maximum, well-defined values, this opens up a new vista in the measurements of black hole masses and spins and quantitative tests of accretion and jet theory.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If a BH were strongly charged, it would attract oppositely-charged particles, which would neutralize the BH charge.

  2. 2.

    If this were not the case, differential rotation between different parts of the field line would cause the production of new toroidal magnetic field loops and the violation of steady-state assumption, similar to the process illustrated in Fig. 3.2a, b.

  3. 3.

    You can download the code at http://rainman.astro.illinois.edu/codelib

  4. 4.

    We do not expect disk luminosity to exceed L Edd by more than a factor of a few, but there is no such constraint on jet luminosity.

  5. 5.

    It is also possible that instead of the BH, a NS with strong magnetic fields, or a magnetar, powers the GRB.

  6. 6.

    With radiation feedback on the structure of the accretion flow accounted for, the ratio \(\dot{M}/\dot{M}_{\mathrm{Edd}}\) is expected to determine the accretion disk angular thickness, h∕r, which controls the strength of BH magnetic flux and jet power in the MAD state.

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Acknowledgements

AT thanks James Steiner for providing data for Fig. 3.12 and the detailed comments on the manuscript that substantially improved its clarity, Denise Gabuzda for her encouragement that made this work possible, Alexander Philippov for helpful suggestions. AT was supported by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number PF3-140115 awarded by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-03060, and NASA via High-End Computing (HEC) Program through the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames Research Center that provided access to the Pleiades supercomputer, as well as NSF through an XSEDE computational time allocation TG-AST100040 on NICS Kraken, Nautilus, TACC Stampede, Maverick, and Ranch. We used Enthought Canopy Python distribution to generate some of the figures for this work.

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  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 1 Cyclotron Rd, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    Alexander Tchekhovskoy

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  1. Alexander Tchekhovskoy
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  1. Academy of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Ioannis Contopoulos

  2. Physics Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Denise Gabuzda

  3. Department of Physics, University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece

    Nikolaos Kylafis

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Tchekhovskoy, A. (2015). Launching of Active Galactic Nuclei Jets. In: Contopoulos, I., Gabuzda, D., Kylafis, N. (eds) The Formation and Disruption of Black Hole Jets. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 414. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10356-3_3

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