Images of magnetospheric reconnection-powered radiation around supermassive black holes

Abstract

Accreting supermassive black holes can now be observed at the event-horizon scale at mm wavelengths. Current predictions for the image rely on hypotheses (fluid modeling, thermal electrons) which might not always hold in the vicinity of the black hole, so that a full kinetic treatment is in order. In this letter, we describe the first 3D global general-relativistic particle-in-cell simulation of a black-hole magnetosphere. The system displays a persistent equatorial current sheet. Synthetic images are computed by ray-tracing synchrotron emission from nonthermal particles accelerated in this current sheet by magnetic reconnection. We identify several time-dependent features of the image at moderate viewing angles: a variable radius of the ring, and hot spots moving along it. In this regime, our model predicts that most of the flux of the image lies inside the critical curve. These results could help understand future observations of black-hole magnetospheres at improved temporal and spatial resolution.

6 pages + Supplemental Material, 3 figures, accepted for publication in PRL

References in corpus (19)

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Cited by in corpus (19)

• Charged particle dynamics in parabolic magnetosphere around Schwarzschild black hole
• Magnetic reconnection plasmoid model for Sagittarius A* flares
• Relativistic Magnetic Reconnection in Astrophysical Plasmas: A Powerful Mechanism of Nonthermal Emission
• Fitting the light curves of Sagittarius A* with a hot-spot model
• Blazars at Very High Energies: Emission Modelling
• General relativistic effects and the near-infrared and X-ray variability of Sgr A* I
• Bulk Motions in the Black Hole Jet Sheath as a Candidate for the Comptonizing Corona
• Machine-learning heat flux closure for multi-moment fluid modeling of nonlinear Landau damping
• Electromagnetic Energy Extraction from Kerr Black Holes: Ab-Initio Calculations
• Self-consistent multidimensional Penrose process driven by magnetic reconnection
• Relativistic reconnection with effective resistivity: I. Dynamics and reconnection rate
• Prospects for ray-tracing light intensity and polarization in models of accreting compact objects using a GPU
• Deep learning inference with the Event Horizon Telescope II. The Zingularity framework for Bayesian artificial neural networks
• Black hole outflows initiated by a large-scale magnetic field
• Bondi-type accretion onto a Kerr black hole in the kinetic regime
• A kinetic model of jet-corona coupling in accreting black holes
• Driven Collisionless Reconnection of Force-free Flux Tubes: From Onset to Coalescence
• FPIC: a new Particle-In-Cell code for stationary and axisymmetric black-hole spacetimes
• Full-polarization millimeter wavelength variability of Sagittarius A* during the 2018 EHT campaign