Jet Signatures in the Spectra of Accreting Black Holes

Abstract

Jets are observed as radio emission in active galactic nuclei and during the low/hard state in X-ray binaries (XRBs), but their contribution at higher frequencies has been uncertain. We study the dynamics of jets in XRBs using the general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic code HARM. We calculate the high-energy spectra and variability properties using a general-relativistic radiative transport code based on grmonty. We find the following signatures of jet emission (i) a significant gamma-ray peak above ~10^22 Hz, (ii) a break in the optical/UV spectrum, with a change in luminosity from L ~ nu^0 to L ~ nu, followed by another break at higher frequencies where the spectrum roughly returns to L ~ nu^0, and (iii) a pronounced synchrotron peak near or below ~10^14 Hz indicates that a significant fraction of any observed X-ray emission originates in the jet. We investigate the variability during a large-scale magnetic field inversion in which the Blandford-Znajek (BZ) jet is quenched and a new transient hot reconnecting plasmoid is launched by the reconnecting field. The ratio of the gamma-rays to X-rays changes from L_gamma / L_X > 1 in the BZ jet to L_gamma / L_X < 1 during the launching of the transient plasmoid.

12 pages, 11 figures, added new section on density floors and extended the discussion of MAD model variability, accepted for publication in Ap.J

References in corpus (15)

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• Variable TeV emission as a manifestation of jet formation in M87?
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• Gamma Ray Bursts Are Observed Off-Axis
• A jet model for Galactic black-hole X-ray sources: Some constraining correlations
• A Model for Emission from Jets in X-ray Binaries: Consequences of a Single Acceleration Episode
• A disc corona-jet model for the radio/X-ray correlation in black hole X-ray binaries
• Time-Dependent Synchrotron and Compton Spectra from Jets of Microquasars
• X-ray spectra of hot accretion flows

Cited by in corpus (12)

• The Effects of Accretion Flow Dynamics on the Black Hole Shadow of Sagittarius A${}^{\ast }$
• High-energy gamma-ray observations of the accreting black hole V404 Cygni during its June 2015 outburst
• Lepton acceleration in the vicinity of the event horizon: High-energy and Very-high-energy emissions from rotating black holes with various masses
• The multiwavelength spectrum of NGC 3115: Hot accretion flow properties
• Blazar Variability From Turbulence in Jets Launched by Magnetically Arrested Accretion Flows
• Production of intense episodic Alfvén pulses: GRMHD simulation of black hole accretion disks
• Electromagnetic vs. Lense-Thirring alignment of black hole accretion discs
• Observational Signatures of Mass-Loading in Jets Launched by Rotating Black Holes
• Effects of Spin on High-Energy Radiation from Accreting Black Holes
• Magnetic reconnection and Blandford-Znajek process around rotating black holes
• Improved model of X-ray emission from hot accretion flows
• Scale-invariance of black hole accretion: modeling emission from a black hole X-ray binary with relativistic accretion flow simulations