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The Insights We Found After Studying Black Holesby@magnetosphere
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The Insights We Found After Studying Black Holes

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The dominant outward energy transport mechanism is convection driven by magnetic reconnection in the magnetosphere near the BH. Even though a strong magnetic field is essential for this mechanism to work, the energy is carried almost entirely in the form of thermal and kinetic energy of the gas, while the electromagnetic energy flux is negligible. Thus the feedback mechanism seen here is different from the electromagnetically-dominated outflows found in relativistic jets and rotation-driven disk winds.
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This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.

Authors:

(1) Hyerin Cho (조혜린), Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;

(2) Ben S. Prather, CCS-2, Los Alamos National Laboratory, PO Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA;

(3) Ramesh Narayan, enter for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;

(4) Priyamvada Natarajan, Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA, Department of Astronomy, Yale University, Kline Tower, 266 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA and Department of Physics, Yale University, P.O. Box 208121, New Haven, CT 06520, USA;

(5) Kung-Yi Su, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;

(6) Angelo Ricarte, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA;

(7) Koushik Chatterjee, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA and Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, 20 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Abstract and Introduction

Numerical Methods

Hydrodynamic Bondi Accretion

Magnetized Bondi Accretion

Feedback Via Reconnection-Driven Convection

Summary and Conclusions

Acknowledgements


Appendix

A. GRMHD Primer and Definitions

B. Numerical Set-up

C. Resolution and Initial Condition Study


References

6. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS



The dominant outward energy transport mechanism is convection driven by magnetic reconnection in the magnetosphere near the BH. Even though a strong magnetic field is essential for this mechanism to work, the energy is carried almost entirely in the form of thermal and kinetic energy of the gas, while the electromagnetic energy flux is negligible. Thus the feedback mechanism seen here is different from the electromagnetically-dominated outflows found in relativistic jets and rotation-driven disk winds.


These new insights are possible because our numerical technique permits two-way communication between the BH and the external medium over many decades of spatial and temporal scales. In future work, we plan to extend our investigation to the case of a spinning BH that also includes the angular momentum of the gas.


This paper is available on Arxiv under CC 4.0 license.