TY - JOUR
T1 - Global 3D Radiation Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations of Accretion onto a Stellar-mass Black Hole at Sub- and Near-critical Accretion Rates
AU - Huang, Jiahui
AU - Jiang, Yan Fei
AU - Feng, Hua
AU - Davis, Shane W.
AU - Stone, James M.
AU - Middleton, Matthew J.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank the anonymous referee for the useful comments that helped to improve the manuscript. H.F. acknowledges funding support from the National Key R&D Project, under grant No. 2018YFA0404502; the National Natural Science Foundation of China, under grant Nos. 12025301 and 11821303; and the Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program. An award of computer time was provided by the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This research used the resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility, supported under Contract DE-AC02-06CH11357. Part of this work was performed using resources that were provided by the Cambridge Service for Data Driven Discovery (CSD3), operated by the University of Cambridge Research Computing Service ( www.csd3.cam.ac.uk ), provided by Dell EMC and Intel, using Tier-2 funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (capital grant EP/T022159/1), and DiRAC funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council ( www.dirac.ac.uk ). The Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation. J.S. acknowledges support from NASA TCAN grant No. 80NSSC21K0496. M.M. acknowledges support via an STFC consolidated grant (ST/V001000/1). S.W.D. acknowledges support from NASA Astrophysics Theory Program grant No. 80NSSC18K1018.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2023/3/1
Y1 - 2023/3/1
N2 - We present global 3D radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accretion onto a 6.62 solar-mass black hole, with quasi-steady-state accretion rates reaching 0.016-0.9 times the critical accretion rate, which is defined as the accretion rate for powering the Eddington luminosity, assuming a 10% radiative efficiency, in three different runs. The simulations show no sign of thermal instability over hundreds of thermal timescales at 10 r g. The energy dissipation occurs close to the mid-plane in the near-critical runs and near the disk surface in the low-accretion rate run. The total radiative luminosity inside ∼20 r g is about 1%-30% of the Eddington limit, with radiative efficiencies of about 6% and 3%, respectively, in the sub- and near-critical accretion regimes. In both cases, self-consistent turbulence generated by the magnetorotational instability leads to angular momentum transfer, and the disk is supported by magnetic pressure. Outflows from the central low-density funnel, with a terminal velocity of ∼0.1c, are seen only in the near-critical runs. We conclude that these magnetic pressure-dominated disks are thermally stable and thicker than the α disk, and that the effective temperature profiles are much flatter than those in the α disks. The magnetic pressures of these disks are comparable within an order of magnitude to the previous analytical magnetic pressure-dominated disk model.
AB - We present global 3D radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations of accretion onto a 6.62 solar-mass black hole, with quasi-steady-state accretion rates reaching 0.016-0.9 times the critical accretion rate, which is defined as the accretion rate for powering the Eddington luminosity, assuming a 10% radiative efficiency, in three different runs. The simulations show no sign of thermal instability over hundreds of thermal timescales at 10 r g. The energy dissipation occurs close to the mid-plane in the near-critical runs and near the disk surface in the low-accretion rate run. The total radiative luminosity inside ∼20 r g is about 1%-30% of the Eddington limit, with radiative efficiencies of about 6% and 3%, respectively, in the sub- and near-critical accretion regimes. In both cases, self-consistent turbulence generated by the magnetorotational instability leads to angular momentum transfer, and the disk is supported by magnetic pressure. Outflows from the central low-density funnel, with a terminal velocity of ∼0.1c, are seen only in the near-critical runs. We conclude that these magnetic pressure-dominated disks are thermally stable and thicker than the α disk, and that the effective temperature profiles are much flatter than those in the α disks. The magnetic pressures of these disks are comparable within an order of magnitude to the previous analytical magnetic pressure-dominated disk model.
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/acb6fc
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/acb6fc
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85149902646
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 945
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 57
ER -